Trailer for our concerts at Oxford's Quantum Centenary with "the Kazakh Mozart", virtuoso musician and composer Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin.
youtu.be/4e_Gg-BZwo0
05.03.2026 21:15
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Trailer for our concerts at Oxford's Quantum Centenary with "the Kazakh Mozart", virtuoso musician and composer Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin.
youtu.be/4e_Gg-BZwo0
Next week I am hoping for a paper with an algorithm that helps me to proofread bluesky posts, but I think that might be QMA hard.
And then another end-to-end architecture, this time looking at how the best way to use qLDPC codes for the one big application we all know about: breaking current crypto systems. The team at Iceberg Quantum show that it can be done with less that 100k physical qubits.
arxiv.org/abs/2602.11457
Two great papers on the arXiv today!
One has a title echoing that of Kitaev's "Fault-tolerant quantum computation by anyons" almost 30 years ago. Finally Anasuya Lyons and @benbrown.bsky.social shown how to make it work from encoding to decoding.
arxiv.org/abs/2602.11258
We've studied iterative strategies for finding ground states
We use the ground state of an easy Hamiltonian to `warm start' finding the ground states for some harder Hamiltonians
We derive gradient guarantees that (as for adiabatic methods) depend on the gap and a few other natural properties
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Did you know you can simulate quantum states with Pauli and Majorana propagation?
In short: High-temperature states are provably and practically sparse, and we can use imaginary time evolution to get there starting from the infinite-temperature state.
scirate.com/arxiv/2602.0...
If we are comparing to 1st century Galilean miracle workers, perhaps Majoranas are more like Shimon bar Yochai: Spends years naked in a cave, but expected to suddenly emerge with superpowers.
How do we figure out the circuit required to prepare a given state, and what's the best circuit? With help from MPS, these guys get it down to logarithmic depth.
arxiv.org/abs/2602.02698
Spin qubits have finally reached the point where superconducting qubits were 10 years ago!
arxiv.org/abs/2601.23267
Banishing 512 might be easier.
I have 1024 followers!
Nobody else follow me now. I like powers of 2.
It's a 17 qubit rotated surface code.
Logical qubits encoded in the fusion space of non-Abelian anyons in a generalized surface code.
Not the most efficient way to build a quantum computer, but definitely the coolest!
Quantinuum and co show how it's done on one of their H2 devices.
arxiv.org/abs/2601.20956
The background did indeed highlight the experience
Yesterday I did two things:
* Wrote a self-indulgent blog post reflecting on the last 10 years in which I went crazy and started doing quantum games.
* Held a surface code in my hand.
Here I share both with you, the denizens of blue sky
open.substack.com/pub/mothquan...
Today we get the computer scientists' view on the transition into fault-tolerance.
There will indeed be a whole lot of classical computing involved in getting early fault-tolerance running, and the better it is, the more quantum we can use.
arxiv.org/abs/2601.20247
Yeah, that would be an interesting and novel test. Especially now that @andreasateth.bsky.social at ETH has finally provided us some loophole free Bell tests.
Always nice to see that quantum foundations have survived the wave of capitalism that has swept through quantum.
Today Hausmann and Renner from ETH show that quantum states are more than just a few probability distributions in a trenchcoat.
arxiv.org/abs/2601.18872
In terms of the 'early fault tolerance' naming debate. This seems a bit more on the NISQ with FTQC sprinkles side, but could also help out in the early days of full FTQC.
bsky.app/profile/deco...
I got out of the habit of posting half-baked thoughts about papers when Twitter died, But I think I should bring it back!
This paper combines error mitigation inside QEC to cancel leading logical errors and effectively giving a distance boost.
arxiv.org/abs/2601.18384
Sketch of quantum warfare utilising various quantum technology systems
"We are a group of quantum scientists who oppose the ongoing militarization of our societies and the use of quantum research for military purposes."
disarmquantum.com
Manifesto:
arxiv.org/abs/2601.14282
Here's just one example:
"Quantum technology for military applications"
doi.org/10.1140/epjq...
Quantum computing wouldn't be where it is today without the cryptographic applications of Shor's algorithm. We've been militarized for 30 years, and just pretending otherwise. But I definitely support finding ways to fill up QPUs with more inspirational applications.
Yes, I agree that this approach will definitely be a thing on the journey to fault-tolerance. But it should should it's own term, and "partially fault-tolerant" seems good to me.
That's a definition I can get behind!
Is there clear taxonomy that I don't know about. For the noble purpose of avoiding misleading press releases, there probably should be!
To me these seem pretty different. One is about finding and correcting all the errors, and so is proper FTQC. Even if it is early days.
The other is more about detecting and avoiding errors, and probably paying a sampling overhead to ignore them once you find them. So still a form of mitigation.
The other is to have elements of QC interleaved into NISQ. So maybe you have a low distance code mostly (or entirely) doing the job of error correction. Maybe you use a distillation style process to give you a high quality initial state to kick off a NISQ algorithm.
What does early FTQC mean? It seems to be an increasingly popular term, but usage seems to split into two camps.
One is FTQC but early. So you have logical qubits with a decent distance, magic state production to support logical non-Cliffords. It's just early because you don't have a lot of it.
