Talks

Sociologists have interesting things to say about the practice of natural science. I will discuss the sociological phenomenon of multiples in scientific discoveries, with examples drawn from how the ΛCDM cosmology grew, and examples of possible multiple discoveries to come from issues arising in our present well-tested but certainly incomplete cosmology.

A salient feature of black holes near extremality is the appearance of an AdS$_2$ throat in their near-horizon geometry. Depending on the underlying theory, these AdS$_2$ throats may be unstable to fragmentation, wherein a single throat is instead replaced by a tree-like structure of branched AdS$_2$ throats. For Einstein-Maxwell theory, the underlying reason behind this instability is the existence of multi-centered configuration in the moduli space of black hole solutions at fixed total charge. Given the success of the Schwarzian/SYK paradigm for understanding a single AdS$_2$ it is time to revisit the fragmentation story. To build up intuition, I will present a model, studied in the statistical mechanics literature, that shares many features with SYK, including exact solvability at large-N and an emergent conformal symmetry that gets weakly broken in the UV. The novel feature of this model is the appearance of a spin glass phase at O(1) temperatures, which I will try to relate to the fragmentation story.

A quantum error-correcting code depends on a classical decoding algorithm that uses the outcomes of stabilizer measurements to determine the error that needs to be repaired. Likewise, the design of a decoding algorithm depends on the underlying physics of the quantum error-correcting code that it needs to decode. The surface code, for instance, can make use of the minimum-weight perfect-matching decoding algorithm to pair the defects that are measured by its stabilizers due to its underlying charge parity conservation symmetry. In this talk I will argue that this perspective on decoding gives us a unifying principle to design decoding algorithms for exotic codes, as well as new decoding algorithms that are specialised to the noise that a code will experience. I will describe new decoders for exotic fracton codes we have designed using these principles. I will also discuss how the symmetries of a code change if we focus on restricted noise models, and how we have leveraged this observation to design high-threshold decoders for biased noise models. In addition to these examples, this talk will focus on recent work on decoding the color code, where we found a high-performance decoder by investigating the defect conservation laws at the boundaries of the color code. Remarkably, our results show that we obtain an advantage by decoding this planar quantum error-correcting code by matching defects on a manifold that has the topology of a Moebius strip.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/91540245974?pwd=RDkzaVJZZ2tkTldxM2pkdXU5VHlIZz09