Supervisors: Jorge Quintanilla and Paul Strange, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Kent
(see longer description) (about the supervisor) (to application instructions)
Short project description:
Rendezvous is a classic problem in operations research first formulated by Alpern in 1976 [1]. There are many variations by they all revolve around the need for two or more parties to find each other without communicating between them. Applications include search-and-rescue, telecommunications and covert operations. Recently, it has been noted that Physics has something to add to the mixture: if two parties trying to solve a rendezvous problem share a quantum resource (in other words, they are in possession of physical systems that are quantum-mechanically entangled) then there are algorithms they can use that beat the optimal non-quantum strategies [3]. In this project you will use quantum computers to search for optimal rendez-vous strategies making use of this recently discovered quantum advantage.
Project supervisor: see directory for Dr Jorge Quintanilla.
More information:
You can find more background here: see longer description.
To apply, please use the University of Kent postgraduate application for a PhD degree in Physics, and mention the project title and name of the supervisor who you would like to work with. Use the application form to motivate your interest in the project, and how you are qualified. See the group advert for more instructions.
Bibliography:
[1] Alpern, Steve. “Rendezvous search games.” Wiley Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science (2010).
[2] Weber, Richard. “Optimal symmetric rendezvous search on three locations.” Mathematics of Operations Research 37.1 (2012): 111-122. https://doi.org/10.1287/moor.1110.0528
[3] Mironowicz, Piotr. “Entangled Rendezvous: A Possible Application of Bell Non-Locality For Mobile Agents on Networks.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.14404 (2022). https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.14404
[4] Kandala, Abhinav, et al. “Hardware-efficient variational quantum eigensolver for small molecules and quantum magnets.” Nature 549.7671 (2017): 242-246.
(see longer description) (about the supervisor) (to application instructions)