Thierry Kaldenbach from the DLR Institute of Materials Research, together with his team MajoranatzQ consisting of Marc Maußner, Cristian Ilie, Filip-Ioan Ceară, and Oneka Singh, has won the Qiskit Hackathon@World of Quantum 2025! In just 24 hours, they developed an efficient method for optimising fermion-to-qubit mappings, which can be used to significantly simplify quantum circuits for simulating fermionic systems. A total of 14 teams competed in the event, which was organised by IBM Quantum, Messe München and the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space.
The hackathon was about circuit optimisation, i.e. reducing the number of gates and circuit depth in order to ultimately minimise errors – the approach was more or less up to the participants. Thierry Kaldenbach and his team worked on fermion-to-qubit mappings and designed an algorithm that can be used to design customised mappings that outperform conventional designs. The project is thus closely linked to QuantiCoM, as many of our simulations are based on such a mapping, usually Jordan-Wigner.
