Person

Zoë Holmes

Does provable absence of barren plateaus imply classical simulability?

A large amount of effort has recently been put into understanding the barren plateau phenomenon. In this perspective article, we face the increasingly loud elephant in the room and ask a question that has been hinted at by many but not explicitly addressed ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2025

Exploiting symmetries in nuclear Hamiltonians for ground state preparation

Zoë Holmes

The Lipkin and Agassi models are simplified nuclear models that provide natural test beds for quantum simulation methods. Prior work has investigated the suitability of the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) to find the ground state of these models. The ...

SPRINGERNATURE2025

Variational Quantum Simulation: A Case Study for Understanding Warm Starts

Zoë Holmes

The barren plateau phenomenon, characterized by loss gradients that vanish exponentially with system size, poses a challenge to scaling variational quantum algorithms. Here we explore the potential of warm starts, whereby one initializes closer to a soluti ...

2025

Slack-variable Approach for Variational Quantum Semidefinite Programming

Zoë Holmes

Solving optimization problems is a key task for which quantum computers could possibly provide a speedup over the best known classical algorithms. Particular classes of optimization problems including semidefinite programming (SDP) and linear programming ( ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2025

Barren plateaus in variational quantum computing

Zoë Holmes

Variational quantum computing offers a flexible computational approach with a broad range of applications. However, a key obstacle to realizing their potential is the barren plateau (BP) phenomenon. When a model exhibits a BP, its parameter optimization la ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2025

On fundamental aspects of quantum extreme learning machines

Zoë Holmes

Quantum extreme learning machines (QELMs) have emerged as a promising framework for quantum machine learning. Their appeal lies in the rich feature map induced by the dynamics of a quantum substrate-the quantum reservoir-and the efficient post-measurement ...

SPRINGERNATURE2025

Dynamical simulation via quantum machine learning with provable generalization

Zoë Holmes

Much attention has been paid to dynamical simulation and quantum machine learning (QML) independently as applications for quantum advantage, while the possibility of using QML to enhance dynamical simulations has not been thoroughly investigated. Here we d ...

Amer Physical Soc2024

Quantum Tensor-Product Decomposition from Choi-State Tomography

Zoë Holmes

The Schmidt decomposition is the go-to tool for measuring bipartite entanglement of pure quantum states. Similarly, it is possible to study the entangling features of a quantum operation using its operator-Schmidt or tensor-product decomposition. While qua ...

2024

Quantum Computing for High-Energy Physics: State of the Art and Challenges

Zoë Holmes

Quantum computers offer an intriguing path for a paradigmatic change of computing in the natural sciences and beyond, with the potential for achieving a so-called quantum advantage - namely, a significant (in some cases exponential) speedup of numerical si ...

2024

High-fidelity dimer excitations using quantum hardware

Zoë Holmes

The quantum simulation of entangled spin systems can play a central role in quantum magnetic materials discovery. Additionally, the simulation of spectroscopic signatures, such as the dynamical structure factor accessed in inelastic neutron scattering (INS ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2024