The Quantum Pontiff

Arxiv Links to Pontiff, Science at an End?

Alicki, Lidar, and Zanardi have put out version two of their paper critiqueing the assumptions of the threshold theorem for fault tolerant quantum computation. The new title of their paper is “Internal Consistency of Fault-Tolerant Quantum Error Correction in Light of Rigorous Derivations of the Quantum Markovian Limit” and is found at quant-ph/0506201. Discussions about the paper, can be found at the previous posts here and here. I’m a little streched write now to give it a good reading, but I do hope to do so in the next few days (after I finish the four talks I need to write, grade homeworks, and write the homework solution set.)

But I do think it is awesome that in the comment section on the abstract on arxiv.org, the following comment appears:

Comments: 19 pages. v2: Significantly expanded version. New title. Includes a debate section in response to comments on the previous version, many of which appeared here this http URL and here this http URL Contains a new derivation of the Markovian master equation with periodic driving

Which is now my favorite comment on an arxiv paper

Of course, it just isn’t fair competition for the greatest comment ever when you are battling up against the comment producing machines known as Chris Fuchs and Steven van Enk:

quant-ph/0205039 [abs, ps, pdf, other] :
Title: Quantum Mechanics as Quantum Information (and only a little more)
Authors: Christopher A. Fuchs (Bell Labs)
Comments: 59 pages, 5 figures, 140 equations, one simple idea

and

quant-ph/0204146 [abs, ps, pdf, other] :
Title: The Anti-Vaxjo Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
Authors: Christopher A. Fuchs
Comments: 18 pages, not one equation. Requires sprocl.sty

and

quant-ph/0507189 [abs, ps, pdf, other] :
Title: |0>|1>+|1>|0>
Authors: S.J. van Enk
Comments: A more serious version, almost 2.36 pages, but still an unnormalized title
Journal-ref: Phys. Rev. A 72, 064306 (2005)

and

quant-ph/0410083 [abs, ps, pdf, other] :
Title: Quantifying the resource of sharing a reference frame
Authors: S.J. van Enk
Comments: Updated title as PRA did not accept the word “refbit” in the title: PRA accepts neither neologisms (=”a meaningless word coined by a psychotic”, according to Webster), nor novophasms
Journal-ref: Phys. Rev. A 71, 032339 (2005)

and

quant-ph/0207142 [abs, ps, pdf, other] :
Title: Phase measurements with weak reference pulses
Authors: S.J. van Enk
Comments: 5 pages, 5 figures. I apologize for this boring paper
Journal-ref: Phys. Rev. A 66, 042308 (2002)