University of Saskatchewan: The quanTA CRG Seminar

What does mathematics, materials science, biology and quantum information science have in common? It turns out, there are many connections worth exploring. I this talk, I will focus on graphs and random walks, starting from the classical mathematical constructs and moving on to quantum descriptions and applications. We will see how the notions of graph entropy and KL divergence appear in the context of characterizing polycrystalline material microstructures and predicting their performance under mechanical deformation, while also allowing to measure adaptation in cancer networks and entanglement of quantum states. We will discover unified conditions under which master equations for classical random walks exhibit nonlocal and non-diffusive behavior and see how quantum walks allow to realize the coveted exponential speedup in quantum Hamiltonian simulations. Recent classical and quantum breakthroughs and open questions will be discussed.