I’ve been enjoying the weekly colliquium talks on offer this semester at CUNY. While the attendance is usually small, a couple of weeks ago we were lucky to get to have a talk from Leonard Susskind, one of the most influential theoretical physicists of the last 50 years.
The talk was structured as a fairly interactive Q&A, but begun with a brief introduction to complexity, with a focus on black holes and the holographic principle, including a nice discussion of the “ER=EPR” conjecture and an anecdote of the origins of the holographic principle.
I’ve never taken a string theory course, and my one semester of general relativity felt inadequate to capture the full depth of the ideas at play but it was still a fascinating talk. The distinction made between capital S String theory and string theory as a tool for understanding quantum gravity was interesting, especially given recent criticism from within and beyond the physics community.
I’m tremendously grateful for the opportunity to ask questions and engage with the speaker as well as Prof. Dan Kabat at CUNY who works on similar topics, and I was shocked to be invited to follow up personally via email regarding my question on entanglement between static spacetime patches. All in all it was a great reminder of the breadth and depth of quantum information theory as a field, and the many different ways it can be applied to understand the world around us.
Quantum computers are exciting. Applications of quantum information to cryptography, technology and metrology are cool and there is no shortage of commercial hype. I certainly won’t forget now that quantum information theory is much more than just a tool for building quantum computers. It is a powerful lens for understanding the fundamental nature of reality, and the deep connections between information, physics, and spacetime that are still being uncovered. It seems difficult to imagine a universe without information, so even if quantum computers never reach their full potential, the study of quantum information will continue to be a rich and rewarding field of research for decades to come.
My semester has been going well so far, and this year is shaping up to be a good year for publications for me with some interesting projects coming down the pipeline. It’s also been an exciting time to be following developments in quantum computing more generally.
Two big announcements this week have got a lot of attention, reaching beyond just the quantum computing community. Both Google’s announcement and [Caltech/Oratomic] have dramatically reduced the expected resource requirements to run Shor’s algorithm to break the elliptic curve cryptography that underpins Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies. Speculation abounds as this shifts what is known as Q-Day, the day when quantum computers become capable of breaking widely used cryptographic schemes, ever closer. To understand the timeline here it’s helpful to think about two frontiers meeting in the middle somewhere. On the one side we have the hardware, improving quality, reducing error rates, increasing qubit counts, coherence times and connectivity. On the other side we have the algorithms and software, becoming more efficient and reducing the overhead required to implement complex quantum operations. Exactly when the two will converge to make practical quantum attacks feasible is still uncertain, but these announcements suggest it may be sooner than previously anticipated. There has been some recent contrarian speculation, driven in part by works such as this which makes rather gradiose claims of quantum gravity related effects preventing large enough to be practical quantum computers. The author, Oxford’s Prof. Tim Palmer, has recent work on an alternative theory of quantum gravity that I personally find rather unconvincing, but you be the judge!
Google’s announcement was concealed behind a zero-knowledge proof to responsibly disclose the quantum vulnerabilities without exposing them to malicious actors, which is an interesting way to use cryptography! Google suggests that as few as 1,200 logical qubits, implementable with less thank 500k physics superconducting qubit, is all that is required. Oratomic’s announcement was a far more dramatic reducting to 10k-20k physical qubits needed. One potential reason here is that Oratomic’s approach leverages more efficient error correction and qubit connectivity, which significantly reduces the overhead compared to Google’s superconducting qubit implementation. From a glance it would seem that this is more evidence of neutral atoms being the superior platform for scalable quantum computing, due to their connectivity and error correction advantages.
Given that Google have also recently announced they are getting in the neutral atom game, I suspect that neutral atoms will continue to gain traction as a leading platform for scalable quantum computing. While Q-Day is still not here yet, it does seem prudent to make the switch to quantum-resistant cryptographic schemes sooner rather than later. Such a switch for organisations is relatively cheap and easy, no special hardware or fancy consultants needed, just following NIST’s guidelines on post-quantum cryptography with your in-house IT department should suffice, although it will still require careful planning and execution to ensure a smooth transition.
For a long time I’ve been meaning to take IBM’s quantum computing with Qiskit developer exam and, after a lot more studying than I was expecting I finally took it and passed! While I was well prepared for the questions on quantum information theory and properties of circuits at the abstract level, many of the detailed qiskit code segments, or specific implementation syntax were challenging. I was grateful to take the full assessment exam and to have the time to dedicate a couple of weekends to mastering Qiskit beyond the more straightforward project uses I’ve implemented in the past.
The developer exam is just the beginning of my IBM Qiskit journey, as I have recently been approved as a Qiskit advocate! I’m looking forward to working through the progression tiers, promoting Qiskit and contributing to the codebase, there are already a few pull requests brewing in my mind! I’m very thankful to IBM for accepting me and I am exciting to see what the future has in store!
It has been a busy fall semester, as I look to submit my first condensed matter physics paper which is also my first, first author physics paper. It’s definitely been a long road but I am happy to have learned a lot of technical skills throughout. I’ll be sure to make a post with the details in the coming months once they have been officially released. I am also learning more cryptography than I even knew existed! A familiar feeling I’m sure, to anyone who discovers the richness of a new academic field adjacent to their own. I’m keeping busy with my teaching duties, alongside classes and research (not to mention wedding planning!) but I am hopeful I will find the time to submit some intership applications for the coming summer as well.
There have been not one, but two major breakthrough experimental results in the past month for quantum computing! I’m talking of course of Caltech’s record breaking neutral atom system as well as Harvard’s neutral atom “conveyor belt” system. Both groups demonstrated remarkably long coherence times, and a clear pathway to scaling further. Ever since I participated in QuEra’s 2025 hackathon I’ve placed my bets that neutral atoms are the best path toward large scale fault-tolerant quantum computers. These recent results from both Harvard and Caltech, I see as further evidence of this. Of course the jury is not out yet, there are other promising systems and I certainly wouldn’t turn down a job somewhere that wasn’t neutral atom based!
With these recent breakthroughs, along with many other important results and 2025 being the offical UN Year of Quantum Science and Technology, there is an increase in public interest in quantum computing. As a PhD student, I regularly find myself having to answer questions such as, what is a quantum computer? How do they work and what are they good for? How are they difference from normal computers? Over the years, its become apparent that people outside of the industry are hearing more about quantum computing and are curious for what the implications might be. The best analogy I’ve come up with for the distinction between quantum computers and classical computers is that of the laser and the lightbulb. Both things produce light, and both of them have many uses, some of which are in common and some of which are distinct. Just as the invention of the laser didn’t replace every lightbulb in your home, the fault tolerant quantum computer is not going to replace your smartphone or laptop. Lasers are used in all sorts of things people might not think about, such as surgeries, construction and surveying, cleaning, manufacturing, electronics and space exploration. Similarly, quantum computers are likely to provide uses that their lightbulb-like counterparts simply cannot do, of which we have only just scratched the surface! It is an exciting time to be in the field and I’m looking forward to a 2026 filled with lots more milestones.
This past week, I had the opportunity to attend the Unitary Foundation’s Workshop on Error Resilience in Quantum Computing hosted by NYU. It was a nice change of pace to attend a conference without the pressure of presenting or travelling, and was a great opportunity to learn more about a subfield which I have only interacted with as a user rather than a researcher. Though niche in scope, I found the conference was thankfully still accesible and engaging. This was aided by there being present a good balance of industry and academia that made for great networking and some excellent breakout discussion sessions, which is something I wish more conferences would implement! A major thank you to the IonQ team for being excellent discussion facilitators.
Being less of an error resilience researcher, Day Two’s focus on error mitigation in practice was more engaging to me. As someone with a distributed quantum computing background, my favourite presentation was no surprise. From the University of Edinburgh, María Gragera Garcés presentation, titled ‘Scaling Quantum Error Mitigation in the Age of Distributed Quantum Computation’ was very informative. It was also the first time I’ve seen my own paper referenced in someone elses presentation! Using hypergraphs to represent quantum circuits and then employing graph cutting heuristics to implement more resilient distributed algorithms definitely got me thinking about ways to optimize my current research. With the obvious difficulties in finding truely optimal circuit cuts without large classical overhead, I was left curious about the potential impact of employing more ‘bottom-up’ circuit reconfigurations with the eventual graph cut in mind on error resilience. The only thing clear is that there is certainly no shortage of futher research opportunities in distributed quantum computing!
While there are no shortage of very smart people who have developed very sophisticated error mitigation techniques, many presenters made clear the limitations of such techniques as they scale with circuit size. This was most clearly laid out in the work by Algorithmiq’s Matea Leahy, on scalable tensor-network based error mitigation. I certainly appreciate such techniques, particularly when they are easily available and simple for users through cloud platforms such as IBM’s Qiskit framework, the backend and future of which were well covered by Sam Ferracin’s presentation, but I am left wondering about the role such techniques can play in the long run. Perhaps cryptographic protocols with their lower requirements in terms of circuit area are where such error mitigation techniques are most useful, but for the immediate term, I still see hardware challenges, and physical qubit quality as the most important part of the quantum computing stack to address if fault-tolerance is ever to be achieved.