About

Hello, I’m Ashish Kakkar and this is my personal webpage. I am a physicist working in the field of quantum computing. These pages exists to host notes about things I find interesting and useful links to my recent work. At the moment, these are superconducting qubits, quantum compilers and quantum error correction.

A brief history

Currently, I’m a senior scientist at Q-CTRL Inc, Santa Monica, CA. Over the last couple of years I’ve worked on various cool aspects of model building and compilation in superconducting qubit hardware. On some days, I work on interesting quantum error correction and hamiltonian simulation experiments.

Before this, I was working on my PhD (2022) in quantum field theory at the University of Kentucky, advised by Anatoly Dymarksy. After honing the skills of doing integrals on higher genus surfaces (lot of fun btw), I found myself at the interface of conformal field theories and quantum error correcting codes. During this time, I also had the pleasure of working at Argonne national lab as part of a summer fellowship, where I researched quantum algorithms.

Further back, I got my undergraduate degree (BS-MS 2016) at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune. IISER had an infectious enthusiasm for science, and I found a wonderful mentor in Arjun Bagchi with whom I worked on Gallilean limits of field theories (which pop up in the most unexpected places).