Christian Kokail

I did my undergraduate studies in theoretical condensed matter physics at Graz University of Technology in Austria. In my master's thesis, I worked in computational material science, where I focused on investigating superconductivity in high-pressure phases of binary compounds. After that, I switched to quantum optics and quantum information and joined Peter Zoller’s group at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Innsbruck. During the first two years of my Ph.D., I was working on variational quantum algorithms. In particular, I collaborated closely with Rainer Blatt's experimental group to establish a hybrid quantum-classical feedback loop as an interface to the ion-trap experiments in the Blatt lab. Through our combined efforts, we successfully used this setup to realize ground states of complex lattice models and to independently verify the results directly on the quantum hardware. I kept working on the verification of quantum devices, exploiting techniques from Hamiltonian learning, and randomized measurements. Furthermore, I explored novel theoretical ideas to measure entanglement properties in highly correlated many-body states based on efficient tomographic methods to infer the entanglement Hamiltonian. These efforts culminated in the first experimental observation of local entanglement Hamiltonians, confirming predictions for relativistic quantum field theory and conformal field theory.