This was the most challenging presentation I have ever given, and also the most rewarding. I am thankful to my advisor Daniel Lidar, and my committee members, Todd Brun, Eli Levenson-Falk, Itay Hen, and Stephan Haas. They asked many insightful but difficult questions. Fortunately, my friends (Hiyanthi Peiris, Haimeng Zhang, Vinay Tripathi, Victor Kasatkin, and Namit Anand) had spent numerous hours prepping me.
My Ph.D. thesis was titled “Demonstration of error suppression and algorithmic quantum speedup on noisy-intermediate scale quantum computers.” The thesis is not publicly available yet, but the three papers it covers can be found here: Demonstration of fidelity improvement using dynamical decoupling with superconducting qubits, Better-than-classical Grover search via error detection and error suppression, and Demonstration of algorithmic quantum speedup. If you are interested in the slides, you can find them here.
P.S. My advice for graduate students prepping for their defense:
- Prepare your slides at least 1-2 weeks in advance.
- Have intelligent people, who are knowledgeable about your specialty, listen to your presentation.
- Make them ask you difficult questions.