Quantum Computational Physics
summer 2026
Mon, 14.00 | weekly lecture
S. Trebst, E0.03 (ETP)
Tue, 14.00 | biweekly lecture
S. Trebst, E0.03 (ETP)
Tue, 14.00 | biweekly tutorial
F. Eckstein, M. Pütz, Q. Preiss, E0.03 (ETP)
Overview
The lecture will introduce concepts, algorithms, and practical computational skills to simulate quantum many-body systems on digital quantum computing platforms that have become broadly accesible in recent years (such as the cloud-accessible processors from IBM Quantum, AWS Braket, or Microsoft Azure Quantum).As such this lecture aims to complete a "trifecta" of our computational physics curriculum of a bachelor-level computational physics course (mostly addressing single- and few-particle physics), a master-level computational many-body physics course (addressing how to simulate classical and quantum many-body systems on classical compute hardware) with a course doing "quantum on quantum".
This course will not teach high-level quantum algorithms (aimed at revolutionizing, e.g., quantum chemistry calculations) nor intermediate-level quantum simulations (aiming to bring, say, the Hubbard model onto a quantum computer), but will aim at the "assembler-level" of quantum computing, asking what kind of quantum many-body phenomena one can induce in digital quantum circuits that employ not only the conventional set of unitary gates, but also mid-circuit measurements and active feedback.
Please sign up for this course via its ILIAS entry (tba),
which will help us in coordinating this course and its tutorials.
Lectures
Lecture weeks (toggle):
week 1+2 |
week 3+4 |
week 5+6 |
week 7+8 |
week 9+10 |
week 11+12 |
week 13+14
Week 1 (April 13, 2026)
- lecture notes: The dawn of quantum computing (1980-2000), building a quantum computer, overview of qubit platforms and quantum algorithms
- tutorial: Setting up IBM Quantum
Week 2 (April 20, 2026)
- lecture notes: Quantum circuits: qubits, unitary single-qubit gates, two-qubit gates, universal vs. Clifford quantum circuits
- tutorial: Hello quantum world, Qiskit, Can you hear the noise?
Syllabus
- part A:
fundamentals
quantum circuits
quantum measurements
entanglement structures
pure and mixed states
mixed state topology
geometry of entanglement
- part B:
quantum state preparation (shallow circuits)
toric code / quantum memory / long-range entanglement
surface code and many-body teleportation
Nishimori's cat (weak measurement)
non-Abelian topological order
time crystals
- part C:
entanglement dynamics (deep circuits)
random unitery circuits
measurement-induced phase transitions
Kitaev circuits / Hastings-Haah code
qubit fractionalization
Literature
General textbooks- Thomas Wong, Introduction to Classical and Quantum Computing (self-published)
- Nielsen and Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge University Press
available in physics student library, university library - N. David Mermin, Quantum Computer Science, Cambridge University Press
available in physics student library, university library
General references
- Quantum algorithms: A survey of applications and end-to-end complexities, arXiv:2310.03011 This is a survey of the high-level quantum algorithms (requiring millions of qubits) that will not be covered in this lecture.
- Quantum Error Correction For Dummies, arXiv:2304.08678
- Error Correction Zoo, errorcorrectionzoo.org If you want to look beyond the repetition/surface/toric code and the Steane code discussed in the lecture, here are 566 classical and quantum codes. And it is still expanding...
Programming resources on the web
- IBM Quantum, Qiskit
- Clifford simulations: STIM,
QuantumClifford.jl
quantum computing in 2025 - selected publications
- Nishimori transition: Nature Physics 21, 161 (2025)
- Repetition code: Nature 638, 927 (2025)
- Surface code: Nature 638, 920 (2025)
- Steane code: Nature 626, 58 (2024)
Prerequisites
This specialized course is intended for master students; it builds on a bachelor level introduction to quantum mechanics and computational physics as it is taught in many places around the world. Prior attendance of the master-level courses on computational many-body physics and quantum information theory will be a plus.We also expect you to have light programming experience, though not in any specific programming language.