From pulses to circuits and back again: A quantum optimal control perspective on variational quantum algorithms

Understand

The last decade has witnessed remarkable progress in the development of quantum technologies.

• Although fault-tolerant devices likely remain years away, the noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices of today may be leveraged for other purposes.
• Leading candidates are variational quantum algorithms (VQAs), which have been developed for applications including chemistry, optimization, and machine learning, but whose implementations on quantum devices have yet to demonstrate improvements over classical capabilities.
• In this Perspective, we propose a variety of ways that the performance of VQAs could be informed by quantum optimal control theory.