David DiVincenzo
has recently moved from IBM to newly established Institute for Quantum Information in Aachen/Julich. So it was reasonably convenient to him to drop by Delft and give a talk. Leo DiCarlo has presented the speaker as “a man of selective criteria” hinting on DiVincenzo criteria. David talked about error correction codes in quantum algorithms. His main message was that from a multitude of possible error correction circuits one should concentrate on those who have a geometric meaning and can be thought of being performed on elements of a two-dimensional periodic array. He stated that such schemes are now close to practice and appealed to Leo DiCarlo to move to this direction.
I liked the talk that for me had a series of surreal elements as if I’ve been dreaming (swear I have not). Let me list them.
- I seemed to understand the subject: all my previous attempts to understand the principles of quantum error correction resulted in much deeper sleep
- By the end of the talk I had a question. When I started to speak I recognize that I have already posed this question to David in the course of his talk in Delft in 1999.
- This time David gave a very convincing response
- David referred to works of Alexey Kitaev and showed his photograph. I immediately recalled that both David and Alexey were active in the field of quasi-crystals (Nobel prize of that particular day, see previous post).
- So I started to think of implementation of error correcion codes in quasi-crystal lattices. Since I understand no heck in both fields I was trying to combine, that was not an extremely productive thinking. But just in case: let me claim this spectacular idea!
