School of Computer Science Colloquium Announcement of Dr. Vincent Russo:" A conjecture on the antidistinguishability of quantum states”

Date: Friday March 10 , 2023

Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm

Location: Erie Hall, Room 3123

Reminders: 1. Two-part attendance mandatory (sign-in sheet, QR Code)

2. Arrive 5-10 minutes prior to event starting - LATECOMERS WILL NOT BE ADMITTED. Note that due to demand, if the room has reached capacity, even if you are "early" admission is not guaranteed.

3. Please be respectful of the presenter by NOT knocking on the door for admittance once the door has been closed whether the presentation has begun or not (If the room is at capacity, overflow is not permitted (ie. sitting on floors) as this is a violation of the Fire Safety code).

4. Be respectful of the decision of the advisor/host of the event if you are not given admittance. The School of Computer Science has numerous events occurring in the near future.

 

A collection of quantum states are called antidistinguishable if there exists a measurement such that for each state in the collection, the measurement outcome occurs with zero probability. The notion of antidistinguishability is of fundamental interest to quantum information and has also found utility in quantum communication and quantum cryptography. A conjecture by Havlicek and Barrett states that if a set of d pure states has small pair-wise inner products, then the set must be antidistinguishable. The validity of this conjecture would imply the existence of a communication task with an exponential separation between classical and quantum communication complexities. In this talk, we provide a certificate of antidistinguishability via semidefinite programming duality and use it to provide a counterexample to this conjecture when d = 4. We will also showcase the Python code that was used to find the counterexample.

Keywords: quantum information, quantum computing, quantum state antidistinguishability

 

Vincent holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Waterloo where his research centered on how to apply the techniques of convex optimization to the study of entanglement theory and nonlocal games. Vincent holds a Bachelors and Masters from Wayne State University in computer science where his research was focused on writing GPU-driven software to perform molecular dynamics simulations. Vincent previously worked as a software developer at ISARA; a post-quantum cryptographic company. Vincent is the co-founder of Modellicity; a company that is focused on building and developing software for companies in the credit risk space. Vincent continues to perform research in quantum information and is the creator and main developer of "toqito"; an open-source library in Python that can be used to study various aspects of quantum information science.