NIST Paper Selected for 2021 USRA Q2B Applied NISQ Computing Paper Award for 2021

A research paper whose lead author is Lucas Brady of NIST/ACMD (and a postdoctoral researcher at the NIST/UMD Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, QuICS) has been selected as winner of the 2021 USRA Q2B Applied NISQ Computing Paper Award for 2021. The paper, entitled “Behavior of Quantum Algorithms,” was co-authored with Lucas Kocia (Sandia Labs, and a former ACMD NRC postdoc), Przemyslaw Bienias (UMD), Aniruddha Bapat (UMD), Yaroslav Kharkov (UMD), and Alexey Gorshkov (NIST PML).

The Universities Space Research Association (USRA) announced the award on December 9, 2021 at the Q2B conference in Santa Clara, CA. The award is presented to a paper that represents an outstanding advance in the field of applied noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computing.

The paper of Brady et al. unifies the analysis of three major approaches to quantum optimization: adiabatic quantum computing, quantum annealing, and the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA), resulting in important new insights into their behavior. They also present a new algorithmic protocol that does a better job of approximating the optimal one obtained from optimal control theory. The paper has been posted to the arXiv here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.01218.pdf.