Quantum computing is among the most exciting and potentially world-changing technologies in development today. Rigetti Computing is a Berkeley-based startup building full-stack quantum computing systems and offering cloud-based access to them in a hybrid classical-quantum compute environment. In this presentation we will provide an introduction to Rigetti and our view of the full stack of technologies required to build a quantum computer. We will give a brief overview of the theory of quantum computation, discuss recent developments in quantum algorithms, and provide a demonstration of our open-source quantum programming environment running live on a small quantum computer. We will also introduce the hardware architecture used in our quantum computers and present a novel mechanism for producing quantum entanglement within that architecture.
Speaker's Bio:
Shane Caldwell joined Rigetti as an experimental physicist just after finishing his Physics PhD at the University of Chicago in 2015. His dissertation was on a novel technique for beta-delayed neutron spectroscopy using trapped radioactive ions at Argonne National Lab. Currently he is focused on proving a new superconducting qubit architecture for scaling Rigetti's quantum chips beyond 8 qubits.