Dr Zhenyu Cai

As an undergrad, I studied Natural Sciences (Physics) at Trinity College, Cambridge. Upon obtaining my BA and MSci, I then moved to Oxford for my DPhil at Lincoln College, with research focusing on the practical implementation and applications of quantum computing devices. Continuing my line of research on practical quantum computation, I joined St John’s College as a Junior Research Fellow in Physics in the Autumn of 2020.

Quantum computers promise huge speedup over conventional computing in crucial problems like chemistry and materials simulations, decryption, and even machine learning. However, controlled quantum systems are hard to build: Any imperfect manipulations of the qubits from which the machines are formed and any interactions with the environment can lead to errors and loss of their quantum properties. These errors in the quantum hardware are tackled either via employing additional qubits (quantum error correction) or by performing additional runs using the quantum machine (quantum error mitigation). My research centres around developing new schemes for the practical implementations of quantum error correction and mitigation, in order to overcome actual hardware constraints and to target some of the most dangerous errors within the given hardware. In addition, I am also interested in developing possible practical applications for the error-prone intermediate-scale quantum hardware that we will soon have.