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Thursday, July 17, 2025
12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
T-4 Conference Room (TA03, Building 524, Room 105)

Seminar

Threshold for Fault-tolerant Quantum Advantage with the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm

Michael Perlin
JP Morgan Chase

Optimization is often cited as a promising application of quantum computers. However, the low degree of provable quantum speedups has led prior rigorous end-to-end resource analyses to conclude that a quantum computer is unlikely to surpass classical state-of-the-art on optimization problems under realistic assumptions. In this work, we compile and analyze the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) combined with Amplitude Amplification (AA) applied to random 8-SAT at the satisfiability threshold. Our compilation involves careful optimization of circuits for Hamiltonian simulation, which may be of independent interest. We use the analytical scaling of the time-to-solution for QAOA identified by Boulebnane and Montanaro in PRXQuantum.5.030348, and find that with QAOA depth p=623, QAOA+AA achieves a crossover with state-of-the-art classical heuristics at 179 variables and 15 hours of runtime when executed on a surface-code-based fault-tolerant quantum computer with 74 million physical qubits, a physical error rate of 1E-3, and a 1 microsecond code cycle time. Notably, we allow the classical solver to be parallelized as long as its total energy consumption is equal to that required for decoding in the surface code. We further show that this restriction on classical solver energy consumption can be relaxed given optimistic but plausible reductions in physical error rates and fault-tolerance overheads, enabling a crossover of 3 hours using 9 million physical qubits against a classical solver running on a supercomputer with 725,760 CPU cores. These findings support the hypothesis that large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers will be useful for optimization.

Bio: Michael A. Perlin leads the quantum error correction team in the Global Technology Applied Research group at JPMorganChase. Michael received his PhD in theoretical atomic physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he studied quantum sensing and quantum simulation under Dr. Ana Maria Rey. After his PhD, Michael joined Super.Tech (later Infleqtion), and led a theory team focused on quantum sensing, quantum compilers, and quantum error correction. Michael is the chief author and maintainer of qLDPC, an open-source python library for constructing and analyzing quantum stabilizer and subsystem codes. Michael’s primary research objective is to reduce the resource requirements for universal fault-tolerant quantum computation.

https://lanl.zoomgov.com/j/1602070666?pwd=5bbMW6TvUbvmfUgYkwaDGJBXJS0bWm.1
Passcode is 337508

Host: Elijah Pelofske (A-1) and Reuben Tate (CCS-3)