Shawn E. S. Skelton

Professional Life (Physics)

I work in quantum information theory (QIT), a sprawling discipline which weaves between ‘fundamental research’ and ‘practical research’. At its simplest, the field is about how to understand, store, and extract information in quantum systems. QIT is about understanding how microscopic systems evolve under the laws of quantum mechanics, by studying the spread of ‘information’ defined by the properties of particles within the system. But QIT can also be about how to solve systems of linear equations on quantum computers, if we ever manage to get quantum computers to large system sizes and small error rates. So QIT is a tangle of research topics ranging from the foundations of quantum mechanics to algorithms for quantum computers. My own research currently involves the feasibility and resource requirements of quantum algorithms, especially quantum algorithms developed using an algorithm template called quantum signal processing. You can find my CV here . In a past degree, I have also studied tensor networks, applied to both many bodied physics and holographic gravity toy models. My publications and pre-prints include:

Advantage of Warm Starts for Electron-Phonon Systems on Quantum Computers
Qubit-optimal quantum phase estimation of block-encoded Hamiltonians
Prospects of Quantum Error Mitigation for Quantum Signal Processing
Beyond asymptotic scaling: Comparing functional quantum linear solvers
The Hitchhiker's Guide to QSP pre-processing
Mostly Harmless Methods for QSP-Processing with Laurent Polynomials
Realistic Runtime Analysis for Quantum Simplex Computation

I also host and update a github repository for QSP-preprocessing, including some simple QSP simulations, which you can find here.