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Quantum Frontiers

quantumfrontiers.com

A blog by the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter @ Caltech

Science

’15’20’25
Posts
416 from 5 Jul 2012 to 26 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (29 in the last year)
Kind
magazine
Feed
https://quantumfrontiers.com/feed/

2026 25

  1. Lunch with Horace Walpole
  2. Even sampling from a quantum spin glass may not require a quantum computer (a video abstract, for a change)
  3. Letter to a prospective student
  4. The Quantum Omelette Problem: How Much Energy Belongs to the Yolk?
  5. In praise of questions
  6. Marcus theory and Marcus practice
  7. Quantum Computers Need More than “Magic”
  8. How can objects interact without touching?
  9. The Universe, the Uncanny, and Fashion
  10. Nicole’s guide to writing and editing
  11. Interacting collaborators reveal noninteracting fermions
  12. Wise guy
  13. My friend Mark Wise
  14. The physicists of Florence
  15. Nicole’s guide to handling failure and rejection
  16. How I learned to stop worrying and…no, I’ve always adored entropy
  17. Unleashing the Advantage of Quantum AI
  18. The FeMo-cofactor and classical and quantum computing
  19. Nicole’s guide to navigating faculty-position offers
  20. What is next in quantum advantage?
  21. Quantum cartography
  22. Spooky action nearby: Entangling logical qubits without physical operations
  23. Has quantum advantage been achieved? Part 2: Considering the evidence
  24. Has quantum advantage been achieved?
  25. Nicole’s guide to interviewing for faculty positions

2025 21

  1. Quantum computing in the second quantum century
  2. Make use of time, let not advantage slip
  3. Can AI Predict the Quantum Universe?
  4. What distinguishes quantum from classical thermodynamics?
  5. The sequel
  6. Blending science with fiction in Baltimore
  7. John Preskill receives 2025 Quantum Leadership Award
  8. Nicole’s guide to writing research statements
  9. Little ray of sunshine
  10. A (quantum) complex legacy: Part trois
  11. Congratulations, class of 2025! Words from a new graduate
  12. I know I am but what are you? Mind and Matter in Quantum Mechanics
  13. The most steampunk qubit
  14. Quantum automata
  15. Quantum Algorithms: A Call To Action
  16. How writing a popular-science book led to a Nature Physics paper
  17. The first and second centuries of quantum mechanics
  18. Developing an AI for Quantum Chess: Part 1
  19. What does it mean to create a topological qubit?
  20. Lessons in frustration
  21. Ten lessons I learned from John Preskill

2024 23

  1. Finding Ed Jaynes’s ghost
  2. Beyond NISQ: The Megaquop Machine
  3. Happy 200th birthday, Carnot’s theorem!
  4. Sculpting quantum steampunk
  5. Now published: Building Quantum Computers
  6. Announcing the quantum-steampunk creative-writing course!
  7. Always appropriate
  8. Building a Visceral Understanding of Quantum Phenomena
  9. My favorite rocket scientist
  10. Quantum Frontiers salutes an English teacher
  11. Watch out for geese! My summer in Waterloo
  12. Film noir and quantum thermo
  13. Let gravity do its work
  14. To thermalize, or not to thermalize, that is the question.
  15. How I didn’t become a philosopher (but wound up presenting a named philosophy lecture anyway)
  16. My experimental adventures in quantum thermodynamics
  17. Noncommuting charges are much like Batman
  18. The quantum gold rush
  19. A classical foreshadow of John Preskill’s Bell Prize
  20. The rain in Portugal
  21. Discoveries at the Dibner
  22. “Once Upon a Time”…with a twist
  23. Colliding the familiar and the anti-familiar at CERN

2023 20

  1. What geckos have to do with quantum computing
  2. You can win Tic Tac Toe, if you know quantum physics.
  3. Crossing the quantum chasm: From NISQ to fault tolerance
  4. The power of awe
  5. Astrobiology meets quantum computation?
  6. May I have this dance?
  7. Can Thermodynamics Resolve the Measurement Problem?
  8. The Book of Mark, Chapter 2
  9. Caltech’s Ginsburg Center
  10. It from Qubit: The Last Hurrah
  11. The Book of Mark
  12. What is the logical gate speed of a photonic quantum computer?
  13. Let the great world spin
  14. Quantum physics proposes a new way to study biology – and the results could revolutionize our understanding of how life works
  15. Winners of the Quantum-Steampunk Short-Story Contest
  16. Quantum computing vs. Grubhub
  17. Identical twins and quantum entanglement
  18. Memories of things past
  19. A (quantum) complex legacy: Part deux
  20. A (quantum) complex legacy

2022 17

  1. Eight highlights from publishing a science book for the general public
  2. A peek inside Northrop Grumman’s subatomic endeavors
  3. The spirit of relativity
  4. Announcing the quantum-steampunk short-story contest!
  5. Mo’ heights mo’ challenges – Climbing mount grad school
  6. We’re founding a quantum-thermodynamics hub!
  7. Rocks that roll
  8. If I could do science like Spider-Man
  9. Quantum connections
  10. Distilling Quantum Particles
  11. Quantum Encryption in a Box
  12. How Captain Okoli got his name
  13. These are a few of my favorite steampunk books
  14. One equation to rule them all?
  15. The power of being able to say “I can explain that”
  16. Building a Koi pond with Lie algebras
  17. Space-time and the city

2021 15

  1. A quantum-steampunk photo shoot
  2. Balancing the tradeoff
  3. I wish you a Charles River
  4. Entangled Fields and Post-Anthropocene Computation: Quantum Perspectives for a Healthy Planet
  5. Quantum estuary
  6. My 100th anniversary with Quantum Frontiers
  7. How a liberal-arts education has enhanced my physics research
  8. Quantum steampunk is heading to bookstores!
  9. Cutting the quantum mustard
  10. Peeking into the world of quantum intelligence
  11. Learning about learning
  12. One if by land minus two if by sea, over the square-root of two
  13. Life among the experimentalists
  14. Project Ant-Man
  15. Random walks

2020 17

  1. The Grand Tour of quantum thermodynamics
  2. May you go from weakness to weakness
  3. Seven reasons why I chose to do science in the government
  4. Love in the time of thermo
  5. If the (quantum-metrology) key fits…
  6. A quantum walk down memory lane
  7. What can you do in 48 hours?
  8. Eleven risks of marrying a quantum information scientist
  9. Up we go! or From abstract theory to experimental proposal
  10. Quantum steampunk invades Scientific American
  11. A new possibility for quantum networks
  12. Achieving superlubricity with graphene
  13. In the hour of darkness and peril and need
  14. The shape of MIP* = RE
  15. Sense, sensibility, and superconductors
  16. Interaction + Entanglement = Efficient Proofs of Halting
  17. On the merits of flatworm reproduction

2019 23

  1. An equation fit for a novel
  2. Breaking up the band structure
  3. The paper that begged for a theme song
  4. Quantum Error Correction with Molecules
  5. On the Coattails of Quantum Supremacy
  6. Bas|ket>ball: A Game for Young Students Learning Quantum Computing
  7. The quantum steampunker by Massachusetts Bay
  8. Yes, seasoned scientists do extraordinary science.
  9. Quantum conflict resolution
  10. What distinguishes quantum thermodynamics from quantum statistical mechanics?
  11. Introducing a new game: Quantum TiqTaqToe
  12. The importance of being open
  13. Thermodynamics of quantum channels
  14. Quantum information in quantum cognition
  15. The complexity of mosaics
  16. Quantum Information Meets Quantum Matter: Now Published!
  17. Long live Yale’s cemetery
  18. “A theorist I can actually talk with”
  19. Symmetries and quantum error correction
  20. Science Communication Camp: a unique experience
  21. Why care about physics that doesn’t care about us?
  22. Humans can intuit quantum physics.
  23. My QIP 2019 After-Dinner Speech

2018 22

  1. Chasing Ed Jaynes’s ghost
  2. Theoretical physics has not gone to the dogs.
  3. A Roman in a Modern Court
  4. “Methinks, I know one kind like you.”
  5. Doctrine of the (measurement) mean
  6. I get knocked down…
  7. The Curious Behavior of Topological Insulators
  8. The Quantum Wave in Computing
  9. So long, and thanks for all the Fourier transforms
  10. The World Cup from a Quantum Perspective
  11. What’s the worst that could happen?
  12. A finger painting for John Preskill
  13. A quantum podcast
  14. To Feynman on his 100th birthday
  15. Catching up with the quantum-thermo crowd
  16. The math of multiboundary wormholes
  17. Rock-paper-scissors, granite-clock-idea
  18. A poem for Stephen Hawking
  19. Techs in flux & Rock & Roll
  20. The Ground Space of Babel
  21. Fractons, for real?
  22. What makes extraordinary science extraordinary?

2017 29

  1. Panza’s paradox
  2. The light show
  3. Machine learning the arXiv
  4. Gently yoking yin to yang
  5. Majorana update
  6. Paradise
  7. A Few Words With Caltech Research Scientist, David Boyd
  8. Standing back at Stanford
  9. What Clocks have to do with Quantum Computation
  10. Decoding (the allure of) the apparent horizon
  11. Teacher Research at Caltech
  12. Two Views of the Eclipse
  13. Topological qubits: Arriving in 2018?
  14. Taming wave functions with neural networks
  15. The sign problem(s)
  16. Entropy Avengers
  17. The world of hackers and secrets
  18. Time capsule at the Dibner Library
  19. The power of information
  20. Modern Physics Education?
  21. Glass beads and weak-measurement schemes
  22. The entangled fabric of space
  23. Here’s one way to get out of a black hole!
  24. Local operations and Chinese communications
  25. What is Water 2.0
  26. It’s CHAOS!
  27. Ten finalists selected for film festival “Quantum Shorts”
  28. How do you hear electronic oscillations with light
  29. Hamiltonian: An American Musical (without Americana or music)

2016 27

  1. Zoe Saldana Answers the Quantum Call
  2. The weak shall inherit the quasiprobability.
  3. The mechanics of thanksgiving
  4. Good news everyone! Flatland is non-contextual!
  5. Happy Halloween from…the discrete Wigner function?
  6. Tripping over my own inner product
  7. Building the future
  8. Upending my equilibrium
  9. Toward a Coherent US Government Strategy for QIS
  10. Greg Kuperberg’s calculus problem
  11. Quantum Supremacy: The US gets serious
  12. Bringing the heat to Cal State LA
  13. The physics of Trump?? Election renormalization.
  14. What matters to me, and why?
  15. Schopenhauer and the Geometry of Evil
  16. Quantum braiding: It’s all in (and on) your head.
  17. PR-boxes in Minecraft
  18. little by little and gate by gate
  19. Remember to take it slow
  20. March madness and quantum memory
  21. Carbon copy
  22. SQuInTing in the Southwest
  23. Quantum Chess
  24. LIGO: Playing the long game, and winning big!
  25. Some like it cold.
  26. More than Its Parts
  27. Life, cellular automata, and mentoring

2015 37

  1. Quantum Information: Episode II: The Tools’ Applications
  2. Discourse in Delft
  3. BTZ black holes for #BlackHoleFriday
  4. How to get more girls into STEM
  5. Wouldn’t you like to know what’s going on in my mind?
  6. Surprise Happens in Experiments
  7. Explaining Quantum Physics to Newton… in 140 characters
  8. Nothing has been done yet. The world is your oyster…still.
  9. “Experimenting” with women-in-STEM stereotypes
  10. Quantum Shorts 2015: A “flash fiction” competition
  11. Toward physical realizations of thermodynamic resource theories
  12. Bits, Bears, and Beyond in Banff: Part Deux
  13. The enigma of Robert Hooke
  14. Beware global search and replace!
  15. Quantum Information meets Quantum Matter
  16. Kitaev, Moore, Read share Dirac Medal!
  17. Bits, bears, and beyond in Banff
  18. The mentors that shape us
  19. Ant-Man and the Quantum Realm
  20. Of Supersoakers and squeezed states
  21. Holography and the MERA
  22. Hello, my name is QUANTUM MASTER EQUATION
  23. 20 years of qubits: the arXiv data
  24. Who named the qubit?
  25. Mingling stat mech with quantum info in Maryland
  26. Paul Dirac and poetry
  27. Quantum gravity from quantum error-correcting codes?
  28. Putting back the pieces of a broken hologram
  29. Quantum Frontiers salutes Terry Pratchett.
  30. A detective with a quantum helper
  31. Always look on the bright side…of CPTP maps.
  32. Celebrating Theoretical Physics at Caltech’s Burke Institute
  33. Democrat plus Republican over the square-root of two
  34. To become a good teacher, ignore everything you’re told and learn from the masters (part 4 of 4)
  35. To become a good teacher, ignore everything you’re told and learn from the masters (part 3 of 4)
  36. To become a good teacher, ignore everything you’re told and learn from the masters (part 2 of 4)
  37. To become a good teacher, ignore everything you’re told and learn from the masters (part 1 of 4)

2014 45

  1. Actions do change the world.
  2. This Video Of Scientists Splitting An Electron Will Shock You
  3. Bell’s inequality 50 years later
  4. I spy with my little eye…something algebraic.
  5. The Science that made Stephen Hawking famous
  6. When I met with Steven Spielberg to talk about Interstellar
  7. Generally speaking
  8. Apply to join IQIM!
  9. Science at Burning Man: Say What?
  10. Making sci-fi teleportation sound less crazy
  11. The dance of the electrons
  12. The experimentalist next door
  13. Where are you, Dr. Frank Baxter?
  14. The Graphene Effect
  15. Macroscopic quantum teleportation: the story of my chair
  16. Caltech InnoWorks 2014, More Than Just a Summer Camp
  17. How Physics for Poets can boost your Physics GRE score
  18. The singularity is not near: the human brain as a Boson sampler?
  19. Reading the sub(linear) text
  20. BICEP2 and soccer
  21. Ten reasons why black holes exist
  22. “Feveral kinds of hairy mouldy fpots”
  23. The theory of everything: Help wanted
  24. Top 10 questions for your potential PhD adviser/group
  25. John Preskill and the dawn of the entanglement frontier
  26. Of magnetic monopoles and fast-scrambling black holes
  27. Clocking in at a Cambridge conference
  28. The return of the superconducting high school teacher
  29. High School Physics Teacher Embedded on A Quest to Squash Quantum Noise
  30. Hacking nature: loopholes in the laws of physics
  31. A TED experience
  32. Talking quantum mechanics with second graders
  33. Tsar Nikita and His Scientists
  34. Defending against high-frequency attacks
  35. IQIM Presents …”my father”
  36. Inflation on the back of an envelope
  37. My 10 biggest thrills
  38. Summer of Science: Caltech InnoWorks 2013
  39. Oh, the Places You’ll Do Theoretical Physics!
  40. Guns versus butter in quantum information
  41. Making predictions in the multiverse
  42. Navajo Preparatory High Visit: Reflections by Ana Brown
  43. A Quantum Adventure
  44. Reporting from the ‘Frontiers of Quantum Information Science’
  45. Of sensors and science students

2013 47

  1. Building a Computer: Part I
  2. The Navajo connection
  3. More Brainteasers
  4. Jostling the unreal in Oxford
  5. Fundamental Physics Prize Prediction: Green and Schwarz
  6. Polarizer: Rise of the Efficiency
  7. The 10 biggest breakthroughs in physics over the past 25 years, according to us.
  8. Can a game teach kids quantum mechanics?
  9. The cost and yield of moving from (quantum) state to (quantum) state
  10. The million dollar conjecture you’ve never heard of…
  11. Frontiers of Quantum Information Science
  12. Free Feynman!
  13. The complementarity (not incompatibility) of reason and rhyme
  14. Graphene gets serious
  15. What’s inside a black hole?
  16. The Most Awesome Animation About Quantum Computers You Will Ever See
  17. Steampunk quantum
  18. Squeezing light using mechanical motion
  19. Frozen children
  20. Surviving in Extreme Conditions.
  21. On the importance of choosing a convenient basis
  22. Monopoles passing through Flatland!
  23. This single-shot life
  24. We are all Wilsonians now
  25. Don’t sweat the epsilons…and it’s all epsilons
  26. Quantum Matter Animated!
  27. Entanglement = Wormholes
  28. “Nature, you instruct me.”
  29. The Feynman flower
  30. A Public Lecture on Quantum Information
  31. An unlikely love affair
  32. Quantum mechanics – it’s all in our mind!
  33. Project X Squared
  34. Largest prime number found?
  35. Post-Quantum Cryptography
  36. Remembering Arthur Wightman
  37. That’s right, I did say, “A High Fashion Shoot for Geeks”!
  38. De divina proportione
  39. QIP 2013 from the perspective of a greenhorn (grad student)
  40. Grad student life: high highs and low lows
  41. Unsolvable
  42. Science Magazine’s Breakthrough of 2012
  43. Topological insulator trio recognized by 2013 Physics Frontiers Prize
  44. A poll on the foundations of quantum theory
  45. Science books for kids matter (or used to)
  46. Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller get what they deserve
  47. The IQIM has a logo!

2012 48

  1. One, two, three, four, five…
  2. How did I come to know Jeff Kimble
  3. Introduction to Quantum Information
  4. Fundamental Physics Prize Prediction: Polyakov
  5. Stephen Hawking wins $3M Milner Prize
  6. Jeff Kimble stands tall
  7. Jeff Kimble wins 2013 Herbert Walther Award
  8. Is Alice burning? The black hole firewall controversy
  9. Accelerometer: Part I
  10. The X Windows Solution
  11. The Future Of Education
  12. Showtime for Sophomores
  13. It’s been a tough week for hidden variable theories
  14. The TV Frontier
  15. Quantum = Pink
  16. Fermat’s Lost Theorem
  17. One line proof
  18. Individual quantum systems
  19. No calculators allowed
  20. All those different things called Gauge theories.
  21. Redemption: Part II
  22. Redemption: Part I
  23. The allure of elegance
  24. Three Questions: Zach Korth, LIGO
  25. How to build a teleportation machine: Teleportation protocol
  26. A promise
  27. Elementary, my dear Watson
  28. Welcome to the math olympics
  29. Deal or no deal?
  30. Geniuses wanted
  31. Apollo
  32. How I fell in love with teaching and most recently with LIGO
  33. How to build a teleportation machine: Intro to entanglement
  34. The Eiger et al.
  35. How to build a teleportation machine: Intro to qubits
  36. Universal thread
  37. Much more than Lasers and Mirrors
  38. Two-trick pony
  39. Alesha
  40. Kitaev wins $3M Physics Prize
  41. An intellectual tornado
  42. Superconductors in the Summer
  43. Sad about Sally
  44. Supremacy Now?
  45. How I learned to stop worrying and love graphene
  46. Closure
  47. More to come
  48. Hello quantum world!