P9: Noise-aware Quantum Programming (NawaQ)

Members: Dr. Tobias Stollenwerk (FZ Juelich), Prof. Dr. Benjamin Kaminski (Saarland University), Lucas Kehrer (Saarland University)

The project Noise-aware Quantum Programming (NawaQ) addresses one of the main challenges in quantum computing: the fragility of today’s hardware and the errors caused by noise. The project develops methods to make quantum programming explicitly noise-aware, both at the circuit level and within high-level programming languages.

On the circuit side, we enrich quantum diagrams with device-specific or generalized noise information, creating a formal framework for analyzing and optimizing noisy computations. This provides a foundation for advanced compilation techniques that align software more closely with the realities of hardware. On the program side, we design a language that allows developers to query and account for noise directly in source code, combining insights from language design with an understanding of quantum hardware constraints.

The project brings together complementary expertise from Forschungszentrum Jülich (Tobias Stollenwerk), with a focus on quantum hardware and noise models, and Saarland University (Benjamin Kaminski), with a focus on programming languages and formal verification. By uniting physics and computer science, NawaQ aims to lay the foundations for a future quantum software stack that is both physically realistic and programmer-friendly.