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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Not to mention, there isn't sufficient time to check a 40+ page proof.

Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Conference submissions using LLMs can look plausibly correct on a first pass but have a bug hiding deep in the submission. Generally, I don't think of the review process as adversarial, because the author has probably thought about the proof very carefully. Should we change how we review papers?

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

This is a good example of why you should be cautious when extrapolating to the low logical error rate regime arxiv.org/abs/2604.08358

logical error rate of the neural decoder as a function of physical error rate. The power law fit is a smaller exponent at lower physical error rates than at higher physical error rates.

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

How large is too large for a figure to be included in a paper?

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

I've never thought about the viability of fitting my carry on luggage into a CRJ overhead bin, but I will from now on

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

Alexander Meiburg has been working on formal verification of results in quantum information. It's exciting to see a growing library of tools for formal proofs in QI github.com/Timeroot/Lea...

github.com

GitHub - Timeroot/Lean-QuantumInfo: Quantum information theory in Lean 4

Quantum information theory in Lean 4. Contribute to Timeroot/Lean-QuantumInfo development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Though, it's true that we should be much more mindful of the rate of the outer code in a concatenated scheme

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

LDPC does reduce the effects of hook errors quite a bit. Noise-biasing the syndrome extraction circuit does help, but it might not be sufficient if a rare large error event (e.g. ionizing radiation) blows up a surface code patch mid-cycle. That said, we don't have any good models of this.

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

I also want to advertise a recent result by Bergamaschi and Gidney that shows constant space overhead quantum computation can be accomplished with the connectivity of a line (2502.16132). 9/9

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

These sorts of constructions also have good resilience against rare error bursts as long as they are sufficiently spatially localized, so we may see additional reasons to use them as we understand our error sources better. 8/9

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

The Yoked Surface codes by Gidney, Newman, Brooks, and Jones (2312.04522) is a related non-asymptotic approach that shows this style of memory has good practical potential. 7/9

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

We also are interested in making our construction practically relevant and provide a recipe for constructing hierarchical codes / syndrome extraction circuits given an input qLDPC code. This recipe can take advantage of any available long-range connectivity, but it doesn't require it. 6/9

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

We also saturate (up to log factors) a tradeoff between the volume of syndrome extraction circuits and the desired rate of logical error suppression by Baspin, Fawzi, and Shayeghi (2302.04317). 5/9

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

To our knowledge, this is the first proof that we can outperform the surface code in the asymptotic regime using purely geometrically local circuits. 4/9

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

We show that, at a small (log) cost, a quantum memory based on good qLDPC code families can be realized with a threshold using a 2D geometrically local circuit. At the end of the day, we have a memory with rate 1/polylog(N) and error suppression exp(-N/polylog N), exceeding the BPT bound. 3/9

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Given known no-go bounds such as the Bravyi-Pouli-Terhal bound, a natural question is whether we can realize the benefits of modern qLDPC code constructions subject to locality constraints. 2/9

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Happy to share that some previous work with @krishnanirudh.bsky.social and @preskill.bsky.social that we call hierarchical codes (2303.04798) was recently published in Quantum! 1/9

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

@quantumearl.bsky.social seeking bids for QEC26! QEC is exploding, so there’s a good case to move to an annual conference format

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

Has anyone thought about non-asymptotic bounds on code parameters that include the check weight? Especially near-term it would be useful to know if there's something better out there (or what weight-5, weight-6 checks buys you). I'm happy if it's "solve this crazy LP/SDP."

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

Oftentimes, one might write a paper that relies on a bunch (~5-10 pages) of definitions from a different paper. At what point do you say the equivalent of "import otherPaper.definitions"? If it's your own paper, then presumably the original definitions were best?

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

and I think we can all agree, 0.5" margins are probably not reasonable.

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

Letting near-failures through risks setting a precedent that people will just ignore the minimum requirements

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

Perhaps we should specify minimum margins and font size in conference submissions and automatically reject non-conformant submissions?

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

Can I make the obnoxious suggestion that nix might be the answer?

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

I think it would be really cool if someone could write a proof of a fault-tolerant threshold theorem in Lean, but it seems like a major uphill battle since it would be from scratch

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

I think I've also ended up with a sort of tensor network-y conclusion with decorated edges / vertices and labeled "legs." I have a description as a labeled graph where the labels satisfy some consistency conditions, but this is a bit unsatisfying since inconsistent data is possible to describe

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

No arXiv support isn’t really a problem though. You can directly upload PDFs to arXiv. (As long as arXiv can’t recognize the pdf as produced by a LaTeX distribution)

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Realistically, as much as I would like to see it, support by arXiv isn’t a given IMO. For example, (to my understanding) not even pretty well established tools such as LuaTeX have made it. At any rate, Typst is not stabilized yet and there are still occasional breaking changes at the moment

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Also +1, I use it a fair bit now for slides. It's a bit rough in the sense that there's a much smaller body of stack exchange posts for whatever cursed thing you'd like to do, but there's less surprises in the language due to clean separation of code/content

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Chris Pattison @chris-pattison.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

My papers manage their own TeX distribution ;)

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Reposted by Chris Pattison

Steve Flammia @sflammia.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

We're hiring quantum theory faculty at Virginia Tech. This is an open-rank position in the CS or EE department at the new Center in Alexandria, VA, just outside of Washington, DC. This is the first of several new hires at the Center. Come join us (pls RT)! careers.pageuppeople.com/968/cw/en-us...

careers.pageuppeople.com

Details | Open Rank Faculty, Quantum Systems | Careers | Division of Human Resources | Virginia Tech

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