UChicago PME Quantum Science and Engineering Seminar - Ethan Lake

Engineering Autonomous Quantum Memories 

Which many-body systems are capable of retaining quantum coherence, even when subjected to noise? From the perspective of fundamental physics, this question lies at the heart of the ongoing effort to classify phases of matter in open quantum systems, the understanding of which is still in its infancy. The discovery of robustly-coherent quantum systems also stands to directly impact applied quantum science, where they provide a natural route towards fast and scalable quantum error correction. In this talk I will share recent progress on answering this question, presenting two new many-body protocols for stabilizing quantum information in topological codes. These protocols perform error correction in a distributed and fully autonomous manner, functioning without the need for any global decoder. I will discuss how their manifest parallelism can be used to significantly accelerate quantum error correction, and will provide a glimpse into the novel nonequilibrium phenomena currently being uncovered in error-correcting many-body dynamics.