New paper out now! "Hardness results for decoding the surface code with Pauli noise"
The other week I came out with my first paper since starting grad school: Hardness results for decoding the surface code with Pauli noise , with my advisor Akimasa Miyake . I'm quite excited about this result and want to share a nontechnical summary of the results and their implications. First, some background. Quantum computers work by taking advantage of the ways that the laws of physics at the small scales of atoms and molecules (that is, quantum physics) work differently than the the laws of physics at larger scales that we are all familiar with (that is, classical physics). We know we can use these different laws of physics to store and process information differently than how we do so on regular, "classical" computers. In classical computers, the basic unit of information storage is the bit, which can take the value 0 or 1, and we do computation by flipping bits between 0 and 1 based on the values of other bits. Quantum mechanics allows us to store information in