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Interacting collaborators reveal noninteracting fermions
By day, I work as an experimentalist on laser-cooling molecules1, but I’ve never fully surrendered my theoretical-physics license. I started as an undergraduate in Lincoln Carr’s group at the Colorado...
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The physicists of Florence
A scientist in Florence can’t avoid bumping into colleagues. When visiting the Renaissance’s birthplace last summer, I ran into a fellow physicist even on a Saturday morning. I was wandering around...
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How I learned to stop worrying and…no, I’ve always adored entropy
When I was pursuing a PhD at Caltech, so was my friend Jeremy. He used to throw a dinner party every few months. The email invitations welcomed friends to partake of his cooking and, if we wished, to...
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What is next in quantum advantage?
We are now at an exciting point in our process of developing quantum computers and understanding their computational power: It has been demonstrated that quantum computers can outperform classical...
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Quantum cartography
My husband and I visited the Library of Congress on the final day of winter break this year. In a corner, we found a facsimile of a hand-drawn map: the world as viewed by sixteenth-century Europeans....
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Spooky action nearby: Entangling logical qubits without physical operations
My top 10 ghosts (solo acts and ensembles). If Bruce Willis being a ghost in The Sixth Sense is a spoiler, that’s on you — the movie has been out for 26 years. Einstein and I have both been spooked by...
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Has quantum advantage been achieved? Part 2: Considering the evidence
Welcome back to: Has quantum advantage been achieved? In Part 1 of this mini-series on quantum advantage demonstrations, I told you about the idea of random circuit sampling (RCS) and the experimental...
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Has quantum advantage been achieved?
Recently, I gave a couple of perspective talks on quantum advantage, one at the annual retreat of the CIQC and one at a recent KITP programme. I started off by polling the audience on who believed...
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Make use of time, let not advantage slip
During the spring of 2022, I felt as though I kept dashing backward and forward in time. At the beginning of the season, hay fever plagued me in Maryland. Then, I left to present talks in southern...
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What distinguishes quantum from classical thermodynamics?
Should you require a model for an Oxford don in a play or novel, look no farther than Andrew Briggs. The emeritus professor of nanomaterials speaks with a southern-English accent as crisp as...
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A (quantum) complex legacy: Part trois
When I worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a friend reported that MIT’s postdoc association had asked its members how it could improve their lives. The friend confided his suggestion to me: throw more...
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The most steampunk qubit
I never imagined that an artist would update me about quantum-computing research. Last year, steampunk artist Bruce Rosenbaum forwarded me a notification about a news article published in Science. The...
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Quantum automata
Do you know when an engineer built the first artificial automaton—the first human-made machine that operated by itself, without external control mechanisms that altered the machine’s behavior over...
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How writing a popular-science book led to a Nature Physics paper
Several people have asked me whether writing a popular-science book has fed back into my research. Nature Physics published my favorite illustration of the answer this January. Here’s the story behind...
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Ten lessons I learned from John Preskill
Last August, Toronto’s Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control (CQIQC) gave me 35 minutes to make fun of John Preskill in public. CQIQC was hosting its biannual conference, also called...
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Finding Ed Jaynes’s ghost
You might have heard of the conundrum “What do you give the man who has everything?” I discovered a variation on it last October: how do you celebrate the man who studied (nearly) everything?...
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Happy 200th birthday, Carnot’s theorem!
In Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 novel The Wind in the Willows, a Mole meets a Water Rat who lives on a River. The Rat explains how the River permeates his life: “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts,...
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My favorite rocket scientist
Whenever someone protests, “I’m not a rocket scientist,” I think of my friend Jamie Rankin. Jamie is a researcher at Princeton University, and she showed me her lab this June. When I first met Jamie,...
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Let gravity do its work
One day, early this spring, I found myself in a hotel elevator with three other people. The cohort consisted of two theoretical physicists, one computer scientist, and what appeared to be a normal...
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The rain in Portugal
My husband taught me how to pronounce the name of the city where I’d be presenting a talk late last July: Aveiro, Portugal. Having studied Spanish, I pronounced the name as Ah-VEH-roh, with a v...
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