38 points to my daughter! Congrats on a great word.

So deep, it took me a while to realise it was human: youtube.com/watch?v=DRwJ...

Roadmaps! Useful guides for the wider community, or overly simplistic and prone to exaggeration (sometimes, but not always!) ? thequantuminsider.com/2025/05/16/q... I ask because we are reviewing our roadmap: www.riverlane.com/press-releas... What would you like to know, or do you ignore these?

Mama etna has calmed down in time for our flight home to be undisturbed. Surreal to see videos of scary fast pyroclastic flows only a few days after we had a tour up there! (Check the news if you don’t know what I am talking about)

Family holiday. At a loss to name this mythical creature, maybe it is the long forgotten mercentaur! It looks functional for neither sea nor land.

Quantum news: Prof Walmsley returns to Oxford to lead Oxford Quantum Institute www.physics.ox.ac.uk/news/profess... Well deserved, alas the bio in the article misses out one of his most notable career moments, ….

We have an open rolling advert for QEC researchers at Riverlane. And now also have a single post to fill for an (error-corrected) algorithms researcher apply.workable.com/riverlane/j/...

I'm often asked if I'll redo the 2019 quantum factoring estimate. Denser storage by yokes, smaller magic factories by cultivation, slimmer approx arithmetic by Chevignard et al… surely the cost is lower now? Yes, it's lower now. security.googleblog.com/2025/05/trac... arxiv.org/abs/2505.15917

Google quantum symposium is fantastic. But many of the results presented are not on the arXiv yet, and we’ve been asked to not post about them on social media. So, sorry, no live update folks. But I can say cool stuff is coming!

When your marketing celebs get old and need name tags to be recognisable. LA highlights.

Death by surface code!

Nice catalog of talks here.

I love catching up on my “to read” list of papers on planes.  And today found time to read some recent work on randomized phase estimation arxiv.org/abs/2503.05647 from Gunther et al

Arrived in LA. Stuck in traffic on way to hotel, of course. Good flights. Read some papers with a longer update coming soon. Movie: the Dracula remake. Very much liked. Only seen bits of the original but could tell there were a lot of references. Very dark and gritty. 5 stars.

LA here I come! Boarding flight now to head to speak at the Google summer symposium. Followed by a short visit to our Boston office.

You say Tera, I say Mega!

Office slack chat …

“Business mode” Going to economist quantum event in London. 1 day before look at website and surprised to see 1000+ expected attendees, with photos of previous events showing a high density of suits. 5 mins b4 leaving house recheck email and see “dress code: business attire” Slight panic…

The least metal song in the history of "metal": www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSkY...

Worship open.spotify.com/album/1lS7Fe...

I'm hiring a postdoc! If you'd like to work with me on quantum learning, error correction, quantum algorithms, and FTQC at Virginia Tech in the Washington, DC metro area, please apply here: careers.pageuppeople.com/968/cw/en-us...

Thanks Alice & Bob for organising a wonderful week at Les Houches. In, particular Jeremie Guillluad. It was a most lovely event, with great people and surroundings. And a real balance between theory and experiment! I have these mints as a souvenir, and my kids keep asking …

In light of surging interest in "the QEC (quantum error correction)" conference, the steering committee is considering switching to a yearly event. So we are open to bids for 2026 (and/or 2027).

Next stop on Laura’s world tour, Berlin!

Last morning in Les Houches

Morning

@quantumearl.bsky.social seeking bids for QEC26! QEC is exploding, so there’s a good case to move to an annual conference format

Me and the world quantum chess champion 2020 and 2021, now retired.

Casey presents a magic state distillation experiment on Gemini, the latest device from Quera. There have been papers before that do MSD on physical qubits, but I think this is the first MSD demo on d>=3 encoded qubits.

(Yesterday) Bela Bauer of MS talking about their progress. Less hyper than the recent PR as the roadmap slide doesn’t claim that the 8 qubit device is “done”.

Morning

Ted Yoder summarised the onslaught of qLDPC logic papers (for fixed architectures) from IBM (and others). I’ve read most/some of these papers but had a few gaps remaining in my understanding before today …

First time at Les Houches, school of physics for a QEC workshop. Great talks and walks so far.

Waldraff presenting “lattice surgery” with rep codes spilt from a surface code on a 17 qubit transmon chip similar to the infamous krinner et al setup.

A mishmash of slides from NQCC scalability conference, which I intended to post with commentary, but now have a backlog problem so here you go without context:

Oxford! I will be talking Thursday at NQCC scalability conference for a 9am keynote and also here for the QCi3 hub meeting. Beautiful as ever. First time staying at Keble college.

Last week for submissions to QEC'25 in Yale. The bestest quantum error correction conference in the world! Send us your best work by Friday qec25.yalepages.org

Only one week left to submit a contributed talk to QEC 25! qec25.yalepages.org August 11 - 15, 2025, hosted at Yale University. This promises to be the best QEC yet! Please repost!

Anyone live skying from APS MM?

8 APS MM practice talks done today, 4 more tomorrow. Won’t be attending APS but at least get to see our own talks. And looking forward to a relatively quiet week next week, as there are far fewer meetings due to so many of the team heading west.

Congrats again to AWS Catching on my reading post flu. Theory paper indicates a potential 5x reduction in qubit count. www.amazon.science/blog/amazon-... Questions I would love the answer to, and which I would never have thought to ask before joining RL: …

“He will present those results at a talk at the Global Physics Summit of the American Physical Society in Anaheim in March.” So we are waiting for a big APS MM to see the promised data! Live skying please Majorana experts in attendance.

“making this one of the most severe flu seasons in at least 15 years” This flu season is nasty. Me, and many colleagues, knocked out for the best part of a week. And I was flu jabbed! Wash your hands / etc. Quantum commentary to restart soon … historyofvaccines.org/blog/2025-fl...

Pray that @preskill.bsky.social does not release the teraquop

To defeat the dreaded lurgy. Very surprising number of people ill today at work. Some massive superspreader event has occured.

Hiring for a new head of our US science teams! For those with deep research expertise in QEC and good people and leadership skills. The most senior job post I’ve ever advertised and not the sort of role that comes up often. apply.workable.com/riverlane/j/...

Curious now what will happen at March meeting. Not attending this year. Will someone be there and live skying?

Chetan Nayak, in a comment on Scott Aaronson's blog, clarifies that this is the case and gives some details that I don't think were previously shared (that they see Z flips on a 10 ms timescale and X flips on a 5 us timescale). His March meeting talk should be interesting. scottaaronson.blog?p=8669

Massive error on BBC’s part “The chip is powered by the world’s first topoconductor, …, a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature reports” Paper results conflated with press release! Top article in BBC tech page: www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Reading this took me back to me teens when I had a subscription and this was the first place that heard about quantum computing (I think).