Category: Self: Meet Center. Center: Meet Self.

Last week, after going to Innsbruck, I attended the QIPC Workshop in London. The workshop was held at the Royal Society of London and the theme was “Physicists and Computer Scientists Unite!” Scott Aaronson and I were asked to open up the workshop, and, because we are two entirely shameless people we decided that the best way to do this was, given the locale, to replace the debate between physicists and computer scientists with an opening debate between Newton and Leibnitz. Scott has posted our opening dialogue here and the talk which followed it here. And, even more importantly, and to most embarass ourselves, I now present to you incriminating evidence (thanks Viv!) that Scott and I are indeed crazy enough to mock these two great scientists by wearing the appropriate attire:

If you look closely at the following picture, you’ll see that Scott is on the ground groveling before Newton:

And finally, here we make fun of a cookie name

…We can leave your friends behind. ‘Cause your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance, well they’re no friends of mine.
Yep, that’s right, it’s the new paper dance! In last weeks arxiv listing a new paper by myself and Andrea Cassacino, a graduate student from Siena, Italy, appeared as quant-ph/0610088:

Quantum Error Correcting Subsystem Codes From Two Classical Linear Codes
Authors: Dave Bacon, Andrea Cassacino
Comments: 8 pages, Allerton 2006 conference
The essential insight of quantum error correction was that quantum information can be protected by suitably encoding this quantum information across multiple independently erred quantum systems. Recently it was realized that, since the most general method for encoding quantum information is to encode it into a subsystem, there exists a novel form of quantum error correction beyond the traditional quantum error correcting subspace codes. These new quantum error correcting subsystem codes differ from subspace codes in that their quantum correcting routines can be considerably simpler than related subspace codes. Here we present a class of quantum error correcting subsystem codes constructed from two classical linear codes. These codes are the subsystem versions of the quantum error correcting subspace codes which are generalizations of Shor’s original quantum error correcting subspace codes. For every Shor-type code, the codes we present give a considerable savings in the number of stabilizer measurements needed in their error recovery routines.

The cool thing about this paper is that it officially makes me old. Why? Because now when you click on my name on the arxiv, I now have a second page of listings. Old as the hills, I say!