Cory Aitchison
caitchison.com
Cory Aitchison
@caitchison.com
Quantum info PhD student @ Cambridge University | Error correction and topological matter | Previously @ USyd
Reposted by Cory Aitchison
Here are slides for my @qip2025.bsky.social tutorial on quantum error correction. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
February 24, 2025 at 9:01 PM
Reposted by Cory Aitchison
This is a mega-thread of all Microsoft problems related to topological qubits.

NOTE: I skip the numerous news reports and press releases, this thread is for serious _scientific_ and procedural materials

First retraction: Quantized Majorana Conductance, from Nature

www.nature.com/articles/nat...
RETRACTED ARTICLE: Quantized Majorana conductance - Nature
In a step towards topological quantum computation, a quantized Majorana conductance has been demonstrated for a semiconducting nanowire coupled to a superconductor.
www.nature.com
February 19, 2025 at 5:19 PM
The sensor for the light in my office seems to have a blind spot directly where my desk is.

In the spirit of turning bugs into features I guess this forces me to get up and walk to the light switch every 10 minutes...
January 29, 2025 at 5:14 PM
While I completely agree that AI personalities - especially of minority groups - are bad, we need to be careful about anthropomorphising erroneously... the LLM doesn't know "who created it", it's just generating ideas (in a problematic way!) to make conversation.
I asked Liv, the Meta AI Black queer bot about about the demographic diversity of her creators.

And how they expect to improve “representation” without Black people.

This was the response.
January 3, 2025 at 11:50 PM
Reposted by Cory Aitchison
I'm trying to learn some basic category theory for quantum information, so I started reading "Categories for Quantum Theory" by Heunen and Vicary. It helps me to better grasp what category theory is really about since examples they give are all in my research area.
books.google.com/books?id=FdG...
Categories for Quantum Theory
Monoidal category theory serves as a powerful framework for describing logical aspects of quantum theory, giving an abstract language for parallel and sequential composition, and a conceptual way to u...
books.google.com
December 30, 2024 at 5:33 PM
What will #quantumcomputing look like in 2040? An opinionated piece from Charles Tahan "looks back" at how a focus on measurements and AI shaped the quantum landscape over the next 15 years: arxiv.org/pdf/2412.18726
arxiv.org
January 1, 2025 at 10:45 PM
Reposted by Cory Aitchison
We've been getting a lot of questions about alternate QEC codes, and are we looking into any? Yes! Here's experiments for two on Willow.

The color code: arxiv.org/abs/2412.14256

Dynamic surface codes: arxiv.org/abs/2412.14360
Scaling and logic in the color code on a superconducting quantum processor
Quantum error correction is essential for bridging the gap between the error rates of physical devices and the extremely low logical error rates required for quantum algorithms. Recent error-correctio...
arxiv.org
December 20, 2024 at 4:05 AM
Reposted by Cory Aitchison
Found slides by Ankur Moitra (presented at a TCS For All event) on "How to do theoretical research." Full of great advice!

My favourite: "Find the easiest problem you can't solve. The more embarrassing, the better!"

Slides: drive.google.com/file/d/15VaT...
TCS For all: sigact.org/tcsforall/
December 13, 2024 at 8:31 PM
Google's new Project Mariner reminds me of my old SikuliX (sikulix.com) workflows, and just how finicky and slow automation on the user-input level can be. It may be useful while AI agents can't interface directly with other programs' internals, but surely not as a long-term solution?
December 12, 2024 at 5:28 AM
Reposted by Cory Aitchison
Okay. I made a start. Basic functionality:

github.com/quantumgizmo...
GitHub - quantumgizmos/quantum-journal-typst-template
Contribute to quantumgizmos/quantum-journal-typst-template development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
December 6, 2024 at 12:42 AM
With overleaf's brief hiatus today, just a reminder about the beauty that is latexmk (mg.readthedocs.io/latexmk.html) - automatically re-runs LaTeX the required number of times to correctly generate citations and cross-references.

And it already comes bundled with most LaTeX distributions!
December 3, 2024 at 5:06 PM
What happens when you take a quantum Floquet code and add spatial and temporal randomness to its evolution?

Quite a bit! Our paper from a couple months ago explores this behaviour, using a disordered dynamic automorphism color code as a key example: scirate.com/arxiv/2410.0...
December 3, 2024 at 6:45 AM
Just watched "Linoleum" on the plane - a genuinely moving and wonderfully directed film that I'm surprised hasn't received more attention.
November 27, 2024 at 10:51 AM
Reposted by Cory Aitchison
By popular demand, here is a starter pack of all quantum PhD students on BlueSky that we could find.
go.bsky.app/AUTn1di
November 21, 2024 at 6:28 PM