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kenbrownquantum.bsky.social @kenbrownquantum.bsky.social · 1d

Also my experience. Academic culture benefits immensely from terrific people at the top. To put it more bluntly "Dave Wineland is super nice. Why do you think you can be a <insert favorite expletive here for someone who is a pain to work with >?"

Chad Orzel @orzelc.bsky.social · 2d

My Ph.D. advisor was Bill Phillips, who's a terrific person. Alain Aspect, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Eric Cornell, Jean Dalibard, Wolfgang Ketterle, Dan Kleppner (RIP), Norman Ramsey (RIP), and Dave Wineland were also great whenever I interacted with them. AMO physics is full of good folks.

Dreadnought Holiday @dreadships.bsky.social · 3d

Right, enough of James Watson - who's a senior academic you've met who's been an utter delight?

I'll go first: Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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Graeme Smith @graemesmith.bsky.social · 5d

If you are interested in doing a postdoc with me, please apply to the IQC postdoctoral fellowship here: iqc-uwaterloo.slideroom.com#/login/progr...

University of Waterloo Attn: Institute for Quantum Computing - SlideRoom

Apply to University of Waterloo Attn: Institute for Quantum Computing. Powered by SlideRoom.

iqc-uwaterloo.slideroom.com

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kenbrownquantum.bsky.social @kenbrownquantum.bsky.social · 19d

A great example of the challenge of writing tests.

Chad Orzel @orzelc.bsky.social · 19d

Quite possibly the dorkiest thing I've ever posted on Substack, about the too-complicated-for-a-midterm question that's been distracting me for a couple of days: open.substack.com/pub/chadorze...

Adventures in Exam Writing: Quantum Edition

"This will be a fun question..." is on the list of Famous Last Words

open.substack.com

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John Preskill @preskill.bsky.social · 23d

Aside from Yang-Mills theory and parity nonconservation, Yang made so many profound contributions to physics! One that deeply impressed me as I was starting grad school: a 1975 paper with T. T. Wu highlighting the role of fiber bundles in gauge theory.
www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/s...

Chen Ning Yang, Nobel-Winning Physicist, Is Dead at 103

www.nytimes.com

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Eli LF @elilevensonfalk.bsky.social · 25d

A little treat going into the weekend: the midterm for my quantum mechanics class was a couple weeks ago, and again the students made memes for extra credit.

Let's start out strong with a PSA about the dangers of nondegenerate perturbation theory. Do you know where your good states are?

Sad Kermit at window with text "Wishing I had diagonalized inside the degenerate subspace before second order went crazy"

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Michael Vasmer @vasmer.bsky.social · 25d

📣 Online QASAR seminar next week

🗣️ Guanyu Zhu (IBM)
📜 Topology for qLDPC: Transversal non-Clifford gates and magic state fountain on homological product codes
⏰ Weds 22 October 5pm (Paris)

Mailing list
sympa.inria.fr/sympa/subscr...

qasar.seminar - Qasar Seminar - subscribe

You've made a subscription request to qasar.seminar. To confirm your request, please click the button below:

sympa.inria.fr

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Dom Williamson @domwilliamson.bsky.social · 26d

Fault-tolerant logical measurement just got a lot faster!

In new work, we show that code surgeries based on hypergraphs, rather than graphs, allow fast and parallel fault-tolerant logical measurements with low qubit overhead (without requiring the code to be single-shot).

arxiv.org/abs/2510.14895

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Craig Gidney @craiggidney.bsky.social · 26d

Here's the recording of my talk at the Simons institute quantum industry day: www.youtube.com/live/SULOaOQ...

And the slides: docs.google.com/presentation...

I was also on the panel discussion at the end of the day (also in the linked playlist).

Optimizing the Annoying Stuff: Reducing Costs Obscured by the Abstract Circuit Model

YouTube video by Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing

www.youtube.com

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Mark M. Wilde @markwilde.bsky.social · 29d

After #SQuInT2025 concluded, @balintpato.bsky.social , Cole Maurer, & I opted for a post-conference discussion on quantum computing, its capabilities, public perception of it, and various geopolitical issues that have arisen recently. Recording available here:

www.reverbnation.com/markwilde/so...

Quantum Computer (SQuInT 2025) | Mark Wilde

Quantum Computer (SQuInT 2025) by Mark Wilde, Rock music from Ithaca, NY on ReverbNation

www.reverbnation.com

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John Preskill @preskill.bsky.social · Oct 7

The pioneering work of Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis showed that very cold electrical circuits behave in ways that exhibit fundamental principles of quantum physics.
www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physi...

Nobel Prize in Physics 2025

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 was awarded jointly to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an...

www.nobelprize.org

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Dave Bacon @dabacon.tachyon.institute · Oct 6

Nice result on inherent size of fault-tolerance scirate.com/arxiv/2510.0...

"Our work contributes to this broader effort by providing evidence of inherent limits: Even when codes
have good rate, there may be fundamental constraints on how much they can reduce the volume of
fault-tolerant circuits."

Tradeoffs on the volume of fault-tolerant circuits

Dating back to the seminal work of von Neumann [von Neumann, Automata Studies, 1956], it is known that error correcting codes can overcome faulty circuit components to enable robust computation. Choos...

scirate.com

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kenbrownquantum.bsky.social @kenbrownquantum.bsky.social · Oct 4

I like the alt-text tradition on this website but I forgot it on the picture above. It is a parking lot at the front of a hotel where people can park while they talk to the front desk. A covered stairway to the right leads to the reception. Beyond the parking lot are oak trees.

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Dr. Aimee K. Gunther @aimeekgunther.bsky.social · Oct 4

It may not be shiny but there are several critical enabling technologies needed to make quantum networking happen ⚛️

phys.org/news/2025-10...

White Rabbit optical timing technology meets quantum entanglement

A small yet innovative experiment is taking place at CERN. Its goal is to test how the CERN-born optical timing signal—normally used in the Laboratory's accelerators to synchronize devices with ultra-...

phys.org

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kenbrownquantum.bsky.social @kenbrownquantum.bsky.social · Oct 4

#hotelview of the parking lot. It is my "lot" in life.

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kenbrownquantum.bsky.social @kenbrownquantum.bsky.social · Oct 4

I also spent one afternoon networking and flyfishing

A smiling man in a floppy hat holding a small fish in one hand and a fly rod in the other on a lawn of grass.

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kenbrownquantum.bsky.social @kenbrownquantum.bsky.social · Oct 4

Went to the Wintergreen Meeting on Physical Chemistry
wintergreen.web.illinois.edu and had a nice hike with @juliebiteenlab.bsky.social

Wintergreen Meeting of Physical Chemists 2025 - Wintergreen Meeting of Physical Chemists

September 27 – October 1, 2025Wintergreen Resort – Wintergreen, Virginia The Wintergreen Meeting of Physical Chemists is a 5-day workshop for fac...

wintergreen.web.illinois.edu

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kenbrownquantum.bsky.social @kenbrownquantum.bsky.social · Sep 18

modern MySpace has been "facebookized"
this is a real let down and I am sad I forgot to ask the wayback machine save my joke myspace page. This tiktok video captures only a tiny subset of the possible designs. As you can see, it is not like here.

www.tiktok.com/@uzamaki328/...

2000’s myspace layouts #myspace #myspacekid #myspacedays #myspacenostalgia #myspacelayout #myspacesongs #myspacetom #myspacethrowback #myspacewallpapers #myspacetomwouldnever #myspacescenequeen #myspa...

TikTok video by uzamaki328

www.tiktok.com

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kenbrownquantum.bsky.social @kenbrownquantum.bsky.social · Sep 17

One danger of modern social media is that crazy posts, bot posts, and real posts all look professional due to formatting. I call it the myspace vs facebook divide or the difference between a zine and a pamphlet. Now I find this non-crazy zine on social media and may need to rework my analogies.

nate @loglog.wtf · Sep 17

I made a zine about quantum gates and distributed it at @unitary.foundation's unitaryCON this two weeks ago.

check it out :) and lemme know what you think

nates.place/static/ng01....

cover of zine called nates gates created on a typewriter

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kenbrownquantum.bsky.social @kenbrownquantum.bsky.social · Sep 16

My favorite Robert Redford movie is Sneakers which features a computer that can break RSA encryption and came out 2 years before Shor's algorithm.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5bA...

Sneakers (4/9) Movie CLIP - No More Secrets (1992) HD

YouTube video by Movieclips

www.youtube.com

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James Wootton @decodoku.bsky.social · Sep 15

Tenure track assistant prof job up for grabs in Basel. It's quantum computing theory, based in computer science, and part of the NCCR SPIN.

Whoever gets this job will probably have to collaborate with me. Whether you see that as a pro or con is up to you.

jobs.unibas.ch/offene-stell...

Universität Basel: Tenure-track Assistant Professorship in Theoretical Quantum Computing

The University of Basel, Switzerland, invites applications for a professorship in theoretical quantum computing. The University of Basel is the home institution of the Swiss National Center of Compete...

jobs.unibas.ch

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Arthur Pesah @arthurpesah.bsky.social · Sep 13

New paper out ✨

Fault-tolerant Transformation of Spacetime Codes, a collaboration w/ @vasmer.bsky.social, Austin Daniel & Ilan Tzitrin, which started during my internship @xanaduai.bsky.social

scirate.com/arxiv/2509.0...

Let's now see if I can summarize 101 pages (🙈) in a few tweets (and memes!)