We asked Or for a layman explanation on his research and the granted research proposal, here is his reply:
In a recent breakthrough, Google demonstrated a phenomenon called "quantum supremacy". The way to demonstrate Quantum supremacy is by solving a computational problem, which quantum computers can solve in a minutes, and classical computers (here a "classical" computer is a computer which is not quantum, like your desktop) will take decades.
But this raises a fundamental question: how do we know whether the quantum computer really solved the problem? The classical computer would take decades!
From a fundamental perspective, to base a scientific theory, we need a prediction, which is then verified in the experiment. But we can't make the prediction - it would take us decades to compute! So, how can we use the scientific methodology to base the theory of quantum computing? The recent Israel Science Foundation grant, dedicated to quantum technologies (in collaboration with Dorit Aharonov, Michael Ben-Or, Nir Bitansky and Ron Rothblum) will (hopefully!) address this question, and several others, such as privacy issues (we don't want the quantum cloud provider to learn what we compute), adapting the notion of Zero Knowledge Proofs to the quantum era, and new notions such as quantum copy protection for classical software.
