I currently am a PhD student in Animesh Datta's group at Warwick. I have been studying Theoretical Physics in Turin from 2014 to 2016 and I subsequently moved to Brisbane (Australia), where I had the opportunity to work on Quantum Error Correction in Howard Wiseman's group.

My PhD project is focused on the study and the development of protocols for the verification of quantum simulators. Quantum computers hold the promise to decidedly increase our computing capacity, providing a huge speed-up in the solution of a certain class of problems which are believed to be intractable by classical devices. An example of that is represented by the simulation of microscopic systems, which is one of the central problems in modern science and has a wide range of applications − from drug design to nuclear physics to quantum chemistry and biology. For instance, while there is no known classical algorithm able to efficiently simulate microscopic systems, it is widely believed that “quantum simulators” will someday be able to simulate interesting microscopic systems. Since many experimental challenges still make the road to a universal quantum computer a hard one, intermediate non-universal machines are nowadays regarded with great interest and might possibly be built in the following decades. However, some fundamental questions concerning their verification arise: how can a classical observer verify the correctness of the outcome of a quantum simulator? How can he get confidence about the correct functioning of the machine, if the outcome he obtains has never been obtained by means of a classical device? Those are some of the conceptual questions I will try to work on during my PhD.

Apart from physics, my hobbies span a wide range of sports and activities. In particular, I love rock climbing and outdoor sports in general, playing the guitar, reading books and playing chess.

Publications

• Samuele Ferracin, Theodoros Kapourniotis, Animesh Datta, "Verifying quantum computations on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices", arXiv:1811.09709.
• Samuele Ferracin, Theodoros Kapourniotis, Animesh Datta, "Reducing resources for verification of quantum computations", Phys. Rev. A 98, 022323 (2018) --- arXiv:1709.10050.