Stefan Knecht has written up a nice summary of Garnet Chan's new paper "No, FeMoCo hasn’t been entirely solved but for its gold-standard active space model (the model QC folks have been looking at), there is now a classical benchmark which provides an excellent baseline for any quantum work." 🧵👇

The Fields Institute (Toronto) has this summer a "Thematic Program on Optimal Transport in Natural Sciences and Statistics" I see this as a chance for quantum folk to chat with optimal transport experts to see if it could help them e.g. understand trainability questions or develop new quantum algs.

And the results of the annual Quantum Physics 2 meme competition are in… 🥁 🪘🛢️🍗 in fifth place we have a meme that I secretly have a lot of sympathy for…

I made the bold decision to host my group's Christmas dinner/party Chaos persued 'Team cooking' arranged a four course meal featuring a whole salmon, capon, lamb shoulder and countless sides/desserts. Followed by crackers, secret santa and slide karaoke Miraculously only one glass was broken

Yanting is keeping you updated on our efforts to continually improve propagation algorithms and our code-base PauliPropagation.jl. This time with memory savings and increased robustness to truncations for simulating quantum systems with certain symmetries ⬆️ ➡️ ⬇️ ⬅️ Expect more in the future! 🚀

Happy to share our paper: Leveraging Symmetry Merging in Pauli Propagation scirate.com/arxiv/2512.1... tl;dr We improve standard Pauli propagation by merging Pauli strings related by symmetry. Shoutout to my collaborators @sueyeonchung.bsky.social @quantummanuel.bsky.social @qzoeholmes.bsky.social

Hey we've just updated the arXiv version of our Majorana propagation paper We now have end-to-end efficiency guarantees for a randomized model of an adaptVQE-like circuit (Our error bounds here are way tighter than the ones for pauli prop and also use a new Markov chain based proof strategy)

Sit down & buckle up. Behind this rather innocent title is the paper that caused the most fraught arguments of any of my career. Are these arguments important? Probably not. Am I going to tell you them anyway? Absolutely. Here is the story of a rollercoaster of a paper. 🎢👇

(I/III) We're excited to announce a new tenure track opening! The position is called 'quantum informatics' and is affiliated with our QUICK group within the CS+AI division at @jku.at 🇦🇹. Application deadline is November 30th, 2025: www.jku.at/en/the-jku/w...

Applications for the LANL quantum computing summer school are now open! I recently got asked about the most important turning points of my career and without hesistation said the LANL summer school. The first 1/3 of this video is me rambling about why it was so special: youtu.be/XjkHmtr_IT0?...

Our group is looking to hire postdocs to work at the intersection of quantum computing, quantum algorithms, quantum machine learning, simulation of many-body quantum systems and early-fault tolerant quantum computing Apply here: lanl.jobs/search/jobde... Reposts appreciated!

A new article introduces a continuous-variable analogue of the Pauli propagation algorithm, called Displacement Propagation. Surprisingly, non-Gaussianity and symplectic coherence can make the system easier to simulate when noise is present. arxiv.org/abs/2510.07264

Among todays mad arxiv overflow is our preprint: "When quantum resources backfire: Non-gaussianity and symplectic coherence in noisy bosonic circuits" We introduce a path propagation classical simulation alg for bosonic circuits And find a funky interplay between quantum resources and noise 🧵👇

Quantum arXiv today.

We provide evidence of an exponential gap between adaptive & nonadaptive strategies for a quantum recompilation task Key takeaways: - Entanglement isn’t always a roadblock: its degree can aid training - Discrete optimization may be key to finding sweet spots between concentration & surrogation

EPFL are recruiting a tenure track assistant proff working on the theory of condensed matter and interacting quantum matter: www.epfl.ch/about/workin... Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about life at EPFL/in Switzerland etc.

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...

Also, sharing for friends: Anyone fancy a (minimal teaching load) tenure track position on quantum computing on a sunny island 🌤️ 🏝️? The Cyprus Institute are also hiring a tenure track assistant proff on quantum algorithms. onlinerecruitment.exelsyslive.com?c=6E7274A2-8... (Deadline next week)

Fancy being (academic) neighbours? The University of Basel are hiring a tenure-track assistant professor in theoretical quantum computing: jobs.unibas.ch/offene-stell...

I am so, so happy to see this article published as a perspective in Nature Communications: www.nature.com/articles/s41... More than the paper itself, I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with all my co-authors on the implications of the absence of BPs ~ classical simulability connection

I highly recommend @joachimfavre.bsky.social’s typed lecture notes for my quantum info course and on (quantum) computer science more generally 👇 (To give credit where it’s due my quantum info lectures built in turn on @davidbjennings.bsky.social’s brilliant quantum info lecture notes)

Hey! We've put out a paper discussing some pitfalls in attempts to avoid barren plateaus/exponential concentration in variational quantum algortithms and QML. 🧵👇

EPFL are recruiting a tenure track assistant proff working on the theory of condensed matter and interacting quantum matter: www.epfl.ch/about/workin... Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about life at EPFL/in Switzerland etc.

We thank the reviewer for bringing this citation to our attention...

Here's a new perspective on why Grover’s algorithm algorithm works: Unstructured search can be written as ground state problem. Then Grover's is just a product formula approximation of imaginary-time evolution or, equivalently, a Riemannian gradient flow on SU(d) to find this ground state.

Each year EPFL physics students vote for their best lecturers This year, for the first time, the top 3 were all women www.epfl.ch/schools/sb/s... I don't know if this is EPFL students being progressive, or a wider phenomenon, but things have certainly improved since my time as an undergrad...

Retweeting this for the folks (myself included) that weren't online over the long weekend PauliPropagation.jl is open source library that you can use to approximately simulate quantum circuits We explain the nitty gritty of how these algorithms work in practise in our latest companion paper 🧵👇

Wondering whether simply scaling up system sizes and cranking up chaos really supercharges a quantum reservoir, or if dissipation is really a resource at scale? 🌀 We demystify these QRC myths in our new preprint: [https://scirate.com/arxiv/2505.10080] 🧵 Key takeaways in a great thread below!👇

Open for submissions: Focus on Perspectives on the Future of Variational Quantum Computing Find out more here: ow.ly/fR1W50Uu1av Guest editors: ✍️ Marco Cerezo @mvscerezo.bsky.social ✍️ Zoe Holmes @qzoeholmes.bsky.social

Today we posted a paper showing how a double-bracket quantum algorithm can implement quantum signal processing (DB-QSP), i.e., apply polynomial functions of operators to states. Crucially our approach doesn't need any post-selection - but this comes at the expense of increased circuit depths.

🎉I am very happy to see our Barren Plateau Review published in Nature Review Physics. This article condenses 6 years of our LANL work, but also so many amazing papers by the community!! Check it here 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Hey! On the arXiv today we present `Majorana Propagation’ a new classical algorithm for simulating Fermionic circuits. Depending on your mood... the algorithm can be viewed either as naturally suited to compete with, or collaboratively enhance, quantum hardware simulations.

Ironically, there is some reward for organising a major conference - everyone attending appreciates the effort, often leading to enhanced visibility & uplift in invitations elsewhere. Reviewing papers for Nature journals, however, is uncompensated work with no upside. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I’d second that!

There are many things I love about that video, but one thing is how beautiful it is to see people smiling. Reminded strangely of: www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Dm...

I'm heading to APS for the week. If you are around, let me know! Or say Hi after my talk in the C34 session on Monday afternoon.

I'm going to tell you a little story about how the sausage of science journalism is made. You may already know that the big journals - Nature, Science and so on - provide reporters with embargoed copies of papers before they are published. But what exactly does that mean?

The rest of the quantum community

"I was expecting it to be more theoretical, and not just a quantum mechanics course (which I would never do)" One student's feedback for "Quantum Physics 2"... 🤔

Here we take steps to understanding the potential of warm starts for VQAs We provide a general variance lower bound for patches of loss landscapes: - for both structured and unstructured circuits - to provide small-angle-initialization 'guarantees' - to study the scaling of regions of attraction

@kunalq.bsky.social did at least also show us a sexy fridge

Check out our papers showing we can classically simulate most typical quantum circuits with arbitrary local (non-unital/dephasing) noise The core intuition is that noisy random gates behave similarly to local depolarizing noise, killing off high weight Paulis and making Pauli propagation efficient

Our paper titled Variational Quantum Simulation: A Case Study for Understanding Warm Starts has been published in PRX Quantum 🚀 Short explanation 🧵 or you can find the whole paper here: journals.aps.org/prxquantum/a...

Useful perspective, clearly written and well-reasoned. arxiv.org/abs/2501.05694

We had fun arguing 🤺 about the prospects of near-term quantum computing in Lapland/Oxford In arxiv.org/abs/2501.05694 we frame our (reasonably converged) conclusions around common 'myths' concerning error mitigation, VQAs, resource estimates and potential applications Feedback/discussion welcomed!

✍️ Please submit to our special issue of IOP QS&T! We’re broadly after: Careful non-hyped analyses on the current state of Variational Quantum Computing (benchmarks, resource analyses etc) & Big new (maybe half-baked!) ideas about how quantum and variational components can be combined

🚨Question to jumpstart 2025🚨 Will variational quantum algorithms / quantum machine learning provide any form of quantum utility (either exponential/polynomial advantage, in NISQ/FTQC, etc)? 👉Please, elaborate in the comments/provide citations! I really want this discussion!! 1️⃣ Yes 2️⃣ No 3️⃣ Maybe

Just a friendly reminder that applications to our summer school are open until January 19th 2025!! Apply here if you haven't: lanl-summer-school-programs.wizehive.app/program/quan... Or please complete your application by the 19th