Speaker
Description
Quantum computing promises new approaches to combinatorial optimization problems that are ubiquitous in industry. In this talk, we present the RED.ES project, an initiative to apply quantum technologies across the Spanish health, energy, and telecommunications sectors, focusing on real use cases. We review the standard pipeline for tackling these problems: the QUBO formulation, its mapping to the Ising Hamiltonian, and its solution via quantum annealing, digital annealers, and gate-based quantum computers. We then introduce Pauli Correlation Encoding (PCE), a novel variational algorithm that encodes binary variables into expectation values of Pauli operators, achieving a subpolynomial qubit scaling with the number of variables. This approach allows us to work directly with the QUBO loss function and is particularly well-suited for near-term hardware. Using PCE, we have solved RED.ES use cases with up to 100 variables on only 6 qubits. We close with a broader perspective on the role of physicists in this field.