„A rainy afternoon that completely changed my life“

Oneka, a video on YouTube shows you as a child doing pirouettes on ice. How did the little ice princess become a quantum scientist?
As a kid I wasn't really interested in science or physics at all. Instead, I was interested in the world around me—the observable universe, but not necessarily the principles behind the universe and why it works that way. As I got older, and entered high school, I really started looking into math and physics behind things, because this is when these questions first came up to me in my life and a realized that all of the principles and logic behind ice-skating like using my hands when I`m spinning to get faster could actually be modelled by a mathematical equation. And that's related to the world of physics. I became really interested in these principles and seeing how in everyday life without even thinking about it I would use this kind of mathematical logic to do different things. After school I went to the library, and I would sit there and read physics books, and I got one time to this topic. It was at the last chapter, and it was on quantum mechanics. Just from hearing the name it sounded very intriguing to me. When I got to this page—I still remember this moment—it was raining outside and I was looking at the book, and parts of my life completely changed. I learned about the sub-atomic universe and here in the quantum realm everything moves very differently and behaves completely differently than what we intrinsically think is true. Here I started learning about the idea that time moves at different speeds depending on how fast you’re traveling through space. I learned about quantum phenomena like superposition, the idea that particles can be at multiple places at once or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. This kind of stuff bothered my mind for so long, that I really had to see the framework behind it: How is something like this even possible!

It bothered you so much that you had to study it!
Exactly. Actually Einstein, when he discovered quantum mechanics he had a very funny saying for it. He called it spooky action at a distance. It made absolutely no sense to him how these phenomena could be true. I had the same kind of reaction.

In fact, it is bothering. If two particles are entangled, and a change at one causes a change of the other independent of the distance between them, there must be something faster than light. A kind of force that we don't have a clue of.
Part of Einstein's discoveries was that the limitation of the speed of light actually warps time. When you think of something like entanglement, it would challenge the limitation of the speed of light. It was hard for me to take in that these science fiction stuff from the movies could be true.

How did your journey take you from the library to the World of Quantum and to becoming part of this year’s edition of the Qiskit hackathon?
In that library I started developing a new passion for Physics. It is a passion I never had so strong for anything else. It really showed me not just about the world around me, but about what I was capable of and how strong my passion for something can be. I just kept reading about physics and learning about quantum mechanics or topics where quantum properties such as entanglement or superposition are used technologically for computing and applications. I’m very interested in quantum computing. I started searching for it online and talking to people who work in this field. One of them told me about a hackathon that was taking place in Munich. My mother is German, and I really love Germany and the research done there. They are one of the leaders in Quantum computing. I found it super interesting to participate in the hackathon in Munich, which is often referred to as Germany’s quantum valley. I had already worked with Qiskit, IBM's library and language for quantum programming. I kept asking my mother if we could please go to Germany so I could participate in this hackathon. When my birthday came, one of my gifts was a plane ticket to Munich.

How did you team up with Marc Maußner, Cristian Ilie, Thierry Kaldenbach and Filip-Ioan Ceară?
This was interesting! One of my friends is doing her PhD in quantum computing in Germany. As a volunteer she assisted in this program. I asked her if she knew anyone that was participating in the hackathon because I would love to connect with more people. She told me about two friends who wanted to participate. We met for the first time, and they became my teammates. They are super nice people. I think everybody came from across the world, there were people from everywhere. We met two more teammates, and it happened that they were the winners from last year. They were super nice too, and super knowledgeable about quantum computing, especially the topic that we are doing.

Even as a newly assembled team, you won. What was your solution?
The topic of the hackathon was transpilation, which rewrites a given input circuit to match the topology of a specific quantum device, and optimizes the circuit instructions for execution on noisy quantum computers. A quantum circuit is analogue to logic gates in computing. You can adapt them to different types of qubits. When you have quantum circuit which is a bunch of logic gates over a certain qubit, you get basically the quantum equivalent of a classic algorithm. In real practicality, it's not good when you have too many qubits or logic gates because today’s hardware can't deal with that many things at once. There are certain limitations. We talk just about entanglement. If you accidentally destroy the state of one of them, because they are linked, the rest of the state also become destroyed—it´s called decoherence. Basically, after a certain number of qubits are entangled, it becomes very sensitive. The idea of transpilation is optimizing the quantum circuit in a way that you deal with less of these errors.

You kind of overcome today’s hardware limitations mathematically, don´t you?
Yes. There are different ways to mathematically optimize a circuit, so that it executes computation in less steps with less qubits in a more orderly way. What we did was leveraging Qiskit’s transpiler by molecular simulating or more precisely simulating fermionic quantum circuits. Fermions are subatomic particles. A quick sidetrack: One great thing about quantum computing is that you deal with quantum principles. You can model atoms in a more quantum way than a classical computer, because the entire system is fundamentally quantum. We dealt with a problem called the variational quantum eigensolver. Here, you simulate how molecules work in a way that is very difficult for classical computers. We used majorana fermion operators to optimize the circuit and focused on a small set of problems. After 24 hours we got better results than Qiskit’s optimizer.

What a great achievement in such a short time!
In was definitely a very long sleepless night. Everyone was fully engaged and very focused. It was a very nice, very encouraging environment and it had a lot of fun. Teammates were super-collaborative, super interactive, and super nice to talk to. I will definitely participate again in 2027.

Besides that, what are your future plans? With your passion, you could overcome some of the obstacles that prevent us from understanding quantum mechanics...
It simply started as a fascination and it kind of matured into not just a passion for understanding but more so it feels like a duty to be able to harness the power of the quantum world as a gateway to understanding more about our microscopic world and how we can leave this kind of power in order to make more advancements in technology and the future of our society. I think that is what I am most passionate about: It´s not just mechanics but being able to use this and seeing the results like for example in simulation molecules and how many things we can learn, using this technology. That’s where the magic happens. After my studies, my biggest plan would be contributing as much as I can with everything that I’ve learned to the quantum community. I would really love to be more hands-on with quantum and be at the front edge of the breakthroughs. I´m dreaming of having a start-up and building a company that helps develop innovative solutions for quantum computing. I really want to see in my lifetime, what quantum technologies can do for our society and human mankind. That would be one of the biggest blessings that I can have in my life.