Kartik Anand

Hi, I'm Kartik. I like cats, pizza, and thinking about how hard quantum many-body systems are to compute. As a hobby I also develop games. I'm a Master's student in Computer Science at the Hamburg University of Technology, in Martin Kliesch's group at the Institute for Quantum Inspired and Quantum Optimization.

Before that I did a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Goa, from 2019 to 2023, then spent a while at IIT Delhi's Vision Lab on deep learning for computer vision. That work became an ACCV 2024 paper.

I switched to quantum complexity in 2025. Most of that year was independent research on the quantum PCP conjecture and its hardness-of-approximation form, alongside a collaboration with the Quantum Information Theory Group at Seoul National University.

These days I mostly work on quantum algorithms, and in particular on proving why they break: where a speed-up stops holding and what stands in the way. I'm also interested in complexity classes whose inputs are themselves quantum. Instead of a classical bit string, the problem hands you copies of an unknown quantum state or access to an unknown unitary, and asks you to decide something about it or produce a related state. That changes what "efficient" means, and the classical picture doesn't always carry over. And I keep coming back to the quantum PCP conjecture.