A couple of quantum info papers

Surfacing from being submerged by other responsibilities (including jury duty today), I wanted to point out two paper.

This preprint (based on a talk at the Solvay Conference - the 2022 one, not the 1927 one) from John Preskill provides a nice overview of quantum information, at a very accessible level for non-experts.  It’s nice seeing this perspective.

This paper is much more technical and nitty-gritty.  I’ve written before about my curiosity concerning how  good the performance would be of quantum computing devices made with the process control and precision of modern state-of-the-art semiconductor fab.  Here is a look at superconducting qubits made with a CMOS compatible process, using ebeam lithography and other steps developed for 300 mm wafer fabrication.  

More soon….

Brief items - talks, CHIPS, and a little reading

An administrative role I've taken on for the last month that will run through September has been eating quite a bit of my time, but I wanted to point out some interesting items:

• The Aspen Center for Physics, as always, is having some excellent summer programs.  As a consequence, there are now videos available of some strong talks, like this public lecture about entanglement by Duncan Haldane; this one about quantum materials by Piers Coleman, and this one about correlations in flat bands by Ali Yazdani; this one about material learning by Andrea Liu; etc. 
• The CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law this week.   This tries to accomplish multiple tasks, particularly boosting US semiconductor manufacturing and authorizing large increases in the budget of the NSF (including the creation of a new more tech transfer focused directorate).  The manufacturing piece is a natural reaction to the realization that it's probably not great for national security or the stability of the global economy for every major industry to be dependent on semiconductors fabbed in and shipped from Taiwan.  Boosting funding for basic science, including the NSF, is generally great, though I've learned to be cautious in my optimism.  The idea of a large increase in NSF funding has been around for many years (see here for a post I made back in the dawn of time about the 2008 version of this), and if there is one thing I learned from watching my former congressperson, it's that there is a world of difference between authorizations (which this is) and appropriations.  
• Here is a nice piece of writing about spin-charge separation in 1D materials. 
• This is a neat article about an unexpected duality found in a toy particle physics model of gluons.
• It's good to remind people periodically about how screwed up for-profit academic publishing is.  That's why I'm sharing this tweet from January.   
• I'm almost done reading The Man from the Future, the recent biography of von Neumann.  He was an amazing guy, and it's a good read, though I think the author of the biography is a bit too infatuated with his subject.