Guannan graduated from the University of Manchester with a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Statistics. She got another Bachelor’s degree in Statistics from Shandong University at the same time. Then she completed her MSc in Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Computing at the University of Oxford. Her Master’s thesis modeled a decontamination process of chemical agents. Aside from maths, she also enjoys baking, traveling, and sewing. Lately, she is getting started with digital painting. She tells daddy jokes sometimes.

Research project title:
Quantum algorithms for Hamiltonian simulation

Supervisor(s):
Pranav Singh, Chris Budd

Project description:
The Hamiltonian of a quantum system dictates its dynamics completely. The computation of these dynamics under a particular Hamiltonian is called the Hamiltonian simulation problem, and it allows the prediction of the system behavior. Despite significant progress in Hamiltonian simulation on classical computers over the past century, the Hamiltonian simulation problem has remained an extremely challenging task over the past century due to the curse of dimensionality as the computation costs grow exponentially with system size. One of the motivations for Feynman’s 1982 proposal for the design of quantum computers was in response to this problem. The aim of this PhD project is to develop quantum algorithms for Hamiltonian simulation. These include algorithms inspired by classical splitting methods, as well as variational quantum algorithms involving anstaz- based quantum circuit optimization.