Seminar

The dynamics of quantum many-body systems out-of-equilibrium are pivotal in various fields, ranging from quantum information and the theory of thermalization to impurity physics. Fundamentally, the numerical study of larger quantum systems is challenging due to the exponential number of parameters necessary to describe the wavefunction. If their entanglement is low, wavefunctions can be approximated with relatively few parameters using tensor networks. Since equilibrium wavefunctions have low entanglement, this makes computations viable.

In the wake of recent progress on quantum computing hardware, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is standardizing cryptographic protocols that are resistant to attacks by quantum adversaries. The primary digital signature scheme that NIST has chosen is CRYSTALS-Dilithium. The hardness of this scheme is based on the hardness of three computational problems: Module Learning with Errors (MLWE), Module Short Integer Solution (MSIS), and SelfTargetMSIS. MLWE and MSIS have been well-studied and are widely believed to be secure.

Quantum states can quickly decohere due to their interaction with the environment and imperfections in the applied quantum controls. Quantum error correction promises to preserve coherence by encoding the state of each qubit into a multi-qubit state with a high-degree of symmetry. Perturbations are first detected by measuring the symmetries of the quantum state and then corrected by applying a set of gates based on the measurements.

The unification of quantum mechanics and gravity is a major outstanding goal. One modern approach to understanding this unification goes by the name ``holography’’, in which gravity can be understood as an emergent description of some more fundamental, purely quantum mechanical system. In this talk I will describe some recent results in holography that elucidate how this emergence works. A starring role will be played by one-shot quantum information theory.

Twisted bilayer graphene is a rich condensed matter system, which allows one to tune energy scales and electronic correlations. The low-energy physics of the resulting moiré structure can be mathematically described in terms of a diffeomorphism in a continuum formulation. Twisting is just one example of moiré diffeomorphisms.

A fundamental requirement for quantum technologies is the ability to coherently control the interaction between electrons and photons. However, in many scenarios involving the interaction between light and matter, the exchange of linear or angular momentum between electrons and photons is not feasible, a condition known as the dipole-approximation limit.

11am - 11:30 am: Research Talk

11:30 am - 12:30 pm: Career Talk

Noise on quantum devices is much more complex than it is commonly given credit. Far from usual models of decoherence, nearly all quantum devices are plagued both by a continuum of environments and temporal instabilities. These induce noisy quantum and classical correlations at the level of the circuit. The relevant spatiotemporal effects are difficult enough to understand, let alone combat. There is presently a lack of either scalable or complete methods to address the phenomena responsible for scrambling and loss of quantum information.

We propose a new sub-Doppler cooling scheme in trapped ion crystals in Paul traps which utilizes a Sisyphus-like cooling mechanism to simultaneously cool all the motional modes of the crystal. We use a hollow tweezer, tuned near resonance with the transition from the qubit manifold to a short-lived excited manifold, to generate a state-dependent tweezer potential. This tweezer also introduces a position dependent quench rate for the qubit states.

Many applications of quantum simulation require qubit representations of a fixed number of fermions (F) in a larger number of possible modes (M). Representing such states is possible with I := ⌈log(M choose F)⌉ qubits, but existing constructions achieving this level of compactness result in fermion operators with gate complexity exponential in I.