FOCS 2026 Workshop

TCS Problems inQuantum Architecture & Compilation

November 2026 · New York City
2.5 hours

Topic

Quantum computing hardware and error correction theory have seen rapid progress in recent years. We are on the verge of achieving early fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC), with a stream of new architectural proposals targeting cryptanalysis and chemistry simulations. The design of quantum architectures, and compilation of useful applications to such architectures, is becoming a popular area of research with many new problems and opportunities.

This workshop aims to formulate clean TCS problems arising from this emerging topic, with particular emphasis on architectural design choices and tradeoffs, bottlenecks in space-time overhead, compilation methods and challenges, and mathematical formulation of hardware constraints. Example questions include lower bounds and tradeoffs on space-time overhead for FTQC, bounds on non-Clifford resources in algorithms, hypergraph expansion and sparsification for code surgery, adapting classical code-design principles to quantum codes, and more. As the race toward application-scale quantum computers accelerates, these architectural choices create timely opportunities for theoretical computer scientists to shape both algorithms and hardware.

When November 8, 2026
Where NYU Kimmel Center for University Life, New York, NY

Schedule

30 min

Zhiyang (Sunny) He

Overview of modern FTQC architectures

30 min
+ 10 Q&A
30 min
+ 10 Q&A

Qian Xu

TBD

30 min
+ 10 Q&A

Ted Yoder

TBD

Organizers

Caltech & Oratomic
UT Austin
Google
University of Waterloo