How we learned to stop worrying about publish-or-perish and love just-doing-quantum-research
To create a successful ecosystem for quantum technologies, we need to rethink the way we do research, teaching and outreach.
Written by Guillermo Garcia-Perez, Sabrina Maniscalco, Matteo Rossi, and Boris Sokolov
None of us truly believed it was possible. Research, from idea to results, in two days?
This is the story of how, during a weekend, our team formed by a PhD student, two postdocs and a professor came up with an interesting and impactful research question for quantum technologies, solved it by working together, found a bunch of useful applications, met an old friend who jumped on board and helped with the project, invented a new visualization tool for quantum many-body systems, coded the related Qiskit package and made it available for pull request in Github, interacted and discussed with over one hundred brilliant and fun quantum computing enthusiasts, enjoyed the breathtakingly beautiful views of Swiss Alps, went to a 007-themed outdoor disco on top of a 3000-meter-tall mountain, enjoyed a fantastic via ferrata, and returned home to write a paper, which is now submitted to a high impact journal — all within in a week! And, oh boy did we have fun!
This story happened at Qiskit Camp Europe, organized by the visionary IBM Qiskit Community Team this past September, and made us question and rethink the way we are working in academia. Our experience at Qiskit Camp Europe taught us that perhaps there are more effective, more fun and more interesting ways of doing research, and they are still almost completely unexplored.
We don’t do research for publishing, we do research because we love thinking collaboratively. We also believe that research in quantum technologies can help to solve the major global issues of our time. But, in truth, at all stages of academic career, the main source of stress is due to two factors considered crucial “to survive”: the need to publish (a lot and in high impact journals) and the need to attract (a lot of) funding. Being constantly subjected to these two poisoning stress factors has pushed many incredibly talented researchers outside academia and is causing depression and other mental issues to many who decided to stay [1–3]. It is time to acknowledge that the standard conservative ways of doing research should be accompanied by new ways of thinking and collaborating: more daring, more exploratory, more creative, more cross-disciplinary, more inspiring, more fun!
It’s not easy to describe the spirit of Qiskit Camps. It’s a mixture of excitement, adrenaline for the challenge, rush to meet the deadline, commitment to do the best you can, and complete immersion in the project. All this is somehow amplified by the atmosphere created by the whole group, a sense of living a unique and unforgettable shared experience.
Teams are formed after an initial pitch of ideas. The questions that our team — called If Quantum — decided to tackle were initially rather general: How can we tell if a quantum computer is really quantum? How can we investigate and characterize “quantumness” in a quantum computer or simulator? As we proceeded with our discussions, they became however more specific and focused: How can we infer the complex network of quantum correlations (such as entanglement) which get dynamically created as quantum programs are run and quantum algorithms implemented?
The answer to these questions is surprisingly difficult and, despite the efforts of many researchers from all over the world, only partial answers have been given. At the core of this difficulty is the fact that, as quantum physicists know far too well, fully characterizing the quantum state of a many-qubits system is a very hard problem: its complexity increases exponentially with the number of qubits.
Reconstructing the state of a generic quantum system requires a process called quantum state tomography. Quantum tomography is, however, very “expensive”, since the number of measurements needed to reconstruct the state increases exponentially with the number of qubits, making this task practically impossible already for few-qubit devices. In many cases, it is sufficient to characterise the properties of all pairs of qubits, a process called pairwise tomography. Even if easier than full tomography, this is still a terribly difficult task to perform experimentally, requiring in general a number of measurement settings polynomial in the number of qubits.
During Qiskit Camp Europe, we discovered a way to reduce exponentially the number of such measurement settings, enabling efficient pairwise tomography. Moreover, we introduced a way to visualize quantum and classical correlations in terms of multiplex networks, a concept extensively used in network theory but until now unexplored in the quantum realm. Specifically, multiplex networks are a special type of multilayer networks, where in each layer links represent some property of the 2-qubits reduced states: entanglement, quantum mutual information, purity, classical correlations, and so on. Multiplex networks allow us to study relationships between different layers, opening the way to a whole new investigation tool for understanding and characterising quantumness within quantum computers.
Applications include device characterization and benchmarking, quantum simulations of condensed-matter systems, understanding the emergence of classical reality from the quantum world, analysis of transport in quantum (biological, communication, artificial) networks. Details of our results can be found in our preprint “Pairwise tomography networks for many-body quantum systems”, arXiv:1909.12814.
Driving back from the Swiss Alps to Zurich airport we couldn’t stop talking about all the ideas we had in just a few days. We shared memories of scientific discussions, new friends, silly jokes, beautiful mountain views, sleepless work nights. Most of all, we returned home convinced that something is missing in our traditional approach to research.
If we want to create an ecosystem for quantum technologies worldwide, we need to rethink the way we do research, teaching and outreach. We need to promote experiences that encourage exploration, bring back playfulness and fun, create an atmosphere of non-competitive challenge, and recognize the importance of location and setting for inspiring creative intellectual activity.
References:
[1] The Guardian “Researchers facing ‘shocking’ levels of stress, survey reveals”
[2] “Evidence for a mental health crisis in graduate education” Nature Biotechnology volume 36, pages 282–284(2018)
[3] “Work organization and mental health problems in PhD students”, Science Direct, Volume 46, Issue 4, May 2017, Pages 868–879.
