Urbana Campus Research Calendar (OVCRI)

"Engineering autonomous quantum memories"

Abstract: Which many-body systems are capable of retaining quantum coherence, even when subjected to noise? From the perspective of fundamental physics, this question lies at the heart of the ongoing effort to classify phases of matter in open quantum systems, an understanding that is still in its infancy. The discovery of robustly coherent quantum systems also stands to directly impact applied quantum science, providing a natural route towards fast and scalable quantum error correction. In this talk, I will share recent progress on answering this question, presenting two new many-body protocols for stabilizing quantum information in topological codes. These protocols perform error correction in a distributed, fully autonomous manner, without requiring a global decoder. I will discuss how their manifest parallelism can be used to significantly accelerate quantum error correction and will provide a glimpse into the novel nonequilibrium phenomena currently being uncovered in error-correcting many-body dynamics.  

Bio: Ethan Lake obtained his PhD from MIT in 2023 and is currently a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley. He is interested in a broad range of questions in quantum science and is particularly excited about those at the interface of quantum error correction, many-body physics, and physical information processing.