Barbara Terhal

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On July 17-18 a small symposium "Dreams of Quantum" will be held in honor of David DiVincenzo's work and retirement at RWTH Aachen. The event can be attended via Zoom by all. Information about the program of speakers & the Zoom link can be found at www.quantuminfo.physik.rwth-aachen.de/cms/~bmmwed

Abundant meadow browns about (Kunderberg, The Netherlands)

can't wait to plough thru the sea of submissions 😀

Stunning Signal leak reveals depths of Trump administration’s loathing of Europe Messages inadvertently shared with Atlantic journalist lays bare the unvarnished truth about how Vance and Hegseth feel about European allies

“...I just hate bailing Europe out again,” Vance replied. Hegseth agreed that “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading...." Let's remind ourselves that about 25% of the profit of tech companies like Alphabet, Meta, Apple and Microsoft is made through 'freeloading' European customers.

The tail glistening in the sun gave him or her away (common bronzeback tree snake)

They have a proposal for a 'non-protected' qubit rotation (non-Clifford T gate), but that does not feature in their roadmap, arxiv.org/pdf/2502.12252 (likely to be hard to experimentally).

I am pretty ignorant about actual results, so looking for the bottom line. And when you calibrate a 'normal qubit', you find its resonant frequency and 'Rabi drive' it, i.e. you get a lot more info about the object than on a qubit on which you can only do a supposed X and Z meas...

thx! But "in principle" for a qubit one should be able to do repeated measurements in "X" and "Z" bases, with delay times in between and look at statistics, without ever mentioning the word Majorana, no? Question is what this tests. A qubit seems a more demonstrable object than a MZM though.

also, a similar thing about across-community-reproducibility can be said about Google QEC experiments: we also want to see many teams do this "stabilising a logical bit by QEC in 2 different bases thing", but it ain't that easy/may take time.

:-) The problem is of course that we don't have 100% foolproof "is it a qubit" tests or "is it a good qubit that will scale" tests. But science proceeds by results being reproducible by a community of players, not owned by one company.

On Microsoft's topological qubit: if it looks like a qubit, swims like a qubit, and quacks like a qubit, then it probably is a qubit (so what tests are necessary?). But also: is it a good qubit, and can it be made in many other labs? If not, the animal will remain a rare sighting (owlets not rare).

JD Vance’s Munich speech laid bare the collapse of the transatlantic alliance The US vice-president was hypocritical and insensitive, but bracingly clear in his resetting of relationships

Less than 50% of US voters went for Trump/Vance. Yes, in Europe we fear the fascists as we know how much they promise to restore, how crude their methods are, and how their leadership will lead to destruction, destruction in the end.

ik email je het stuk..

Een hospita, een kamer delen? Hoe studenten alsnog onderdak vinden in tijden van nood Nu de kamernood in de grootste studentensteden oploopt, komen studenten steeds vaker uit bij alternatieve woonvormen. Zoals een hospita, een gedeelde kamer, of een plek in een omgebouwd kantoorpand. ‘...

Leuk stuk van Irene de Zwaan in Volkskrant over huisvestingsnood onder studenten (interview met David & Barbara Terhal :-), www.volkskrant.nl/cs-b2675b98/

How will the fascists (Trump c.s) judge quantum computing when the economic pay-off is iffy in the next 20+ years (or may never materialise).

Trump again demands to buy Greenland in ‘horrendous’ call with Danish PM Source says: ‘The Danes are in crisis mode’ after US president’s call with prime minister Mette Frederiksen

Yes, we should spend at least 5% of GDP on military in Europe, and yes, we should abolish NATO since one of its member states (the one turned fascist) is threatening the territory of another member, so there is little meaning in such alliance.

I am at the ICTS in Bangalore and yesterday while watching waterbirds at a local small lake (see pic), I heard the roar of the leopard who is roaming around. It apparently bit some dogs overnight, see www.vartaguru.com/news/leopard... (Kannada language can be translated via ChatGPT).

Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally Tech billionaire wades into controversy after shooting right arm on upwards diagonal during celebrations of Trump

What could possibly go wrong with Trump/Musk-style fascism?

nee, btw, het zou wel aardig zijn als je verschillende reactie buttons zijn hier (like, medeleven, boos enz) net als fb

Many fascinating things to see and hear at IIT Madras (beyond physics) where I will be in the next 3 months.