Opportunities and challenges of bosonic oscillators for quantum computation and information processing

Quantum harmonic oscillators (bosonic modes) are promising quantum resources, owing to the infinite number of available states and their ubiquitous presence in nature. In this talk, I will present recent theoretical developments on leveraging bosonic oscillators for quantum computation and information processing, highlighting their unique role for both NISQ and fault-tolerant applications. In the first part, I will discuss generalization of quantum algorithmic primitives such as quantum signal processing and linear combination of unitaries from the discrete-variable (DV) to continuous-variable (CV) domain, and showcase their applications in quantum sensing, quantum Fourier transform, and Hamiltonian simulation. Building upon these, in the second part, I will present and analyze instruction set architectures for hybrid quantum processors consisting of both CV bosonic modes as well as more traditional DV qubits. I will conclude the talk with challenges and prospects of using hybrid CV-DV quantum systems to tackle problems across physical sciences and engineering.