Dr. Rick Mukherjee joined the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in Dec 2024 as the inaugural Director of the Quantum Center and an Associate Professor of Physics. He also serves on the board of the Chattanooga Quantum Collaborative. He earned his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Complex Systems in Germany and held research appointments at Rice University, Harvard University, Imperial College London and the University of Hamburg, with expertise spanning in AMO physics applied to quantum simulation of many-body phenomena and quantum information theory. His work is currently supported by multiple federal grants, including the NIST STRS, NSF TIP, and TVA sponsorship.
Presentation Title:
Qudit-based scalable quantum algorithm for solving the integer programming problem
Presentation Abstract:
Integer programming (IP) is an NP-hard problem widely used across finance, engineering, and logistics, but scales exponentially with problem size. Existing quantum approaches are resource-intensive due to qubit encodings, and prior qudit-based methods lack scalability. We present a scalable circuit-based quantum algorithm using multiple interacting qudits, combining a distillation function, phase-amplitude encoding, and quantum phase estimation to isolate optimal solutions with highest measurement probability. The method achieves a provable quantum speedup, significantly reducing time complexity compared to classical brute-force and exact algorithms.