Quantum Information in Quantum Many-Body Physics — Live Blogging Day 2

Day 2 of the conference. By the way, it is pretty difficult to get all this stuff written down correctly the first time through! So, if you see any mistakes please leave a comment so I can fix them. Quantum Information in Quantum Many-Body Physics Barbara Terhal, Adiabatic Quantum Computation and Stoquastic Hamiltonians, arXiv:0806.1746, joint work …

Quantum Article Parse Failure of the Pontiffical Kind

Two observations from yesterdays New York Times article about quantum computing (Moving Toward Quantum Computers.) First, the drawing accompanying the article (here) is interesting to me.  I wonder where they got the idea for it and whether this idea involved Q*bert, color codes, or topological codes?  Or was it just the same old: we have …

Adiabaticly Failing for Random Instances

An interesting paper on the arXiv’s today, arXiv:0908.2782, “Adiabatic quantum optimization fails for random instances of NP-complete problems” by Boris Altshuler, Hari Krovi, and Jeremie Roland. Trouble for D-wave?

links for 2009-02-19

Most powerful ever quantum computer chip in tests – 18 February 2009 – New Scientist the prototype chip built by D-Wave Systems in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, is designed to handle 128 qubits of information. Observation of Unconventional Quantum Spin Textures in Topological Insulators — Hsieh et al. 323 (5916): 919 — Science Very cool …

Video Games for Science

Science is full of hard problems. One hard problem is protein folding. Indeed vast amounts of computer power have been thrown at this problem. So one wouldn’t think that the computer we’ve got sitting on top of our body would be much use for this problem. But is this true? Can humans fold proteins better …