Physique générale : quantique (PHYS-207(a))
The course (taught in French), is a lightweight introduction to quantum mechanics. It starts from a traditional historical introduction of the progress made between 1900 and 1925, covering Planck’s blackbody radiation, the photoelectric and Compton’s effects, the atomic spectra, the wave-particle duality, and Bohr’s complementarity principle. It continues with the stationary Schrödinger equation, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, one-dimensional problems, and the theories of the harmonic oscillator and the Hydrogen atom. It concludes with an elementary account of the theory of electronic states of atoms, molecular bonding, and vibrational and rotational states. If time permits, the last lecture is devoted to an introduction to quantum technology and quantum computing.
Quantum Computing (PHYS-641)
The course covers the modern theory and practice of digital quantum computing. It starts with a short, self-contained crash course on quantum mechanics. Then, it delves into the formalism of quantum circuits and the fundamental quantum algorithms, including Shor’s and Grover’s algorithms, the description of noise, and the elements of quantum error correction and fault tolerance. The course concludes with an overview of variational algorithms for noisy intermediate-scale quantum hardware, including VQE, QAOA, and variational quantum simulation. The exercise sessions are hands-on tutorials based on the Qiskit SDK. The course is offered both at the Master’s and PhD levels.