Henry Yuen

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This problem was originally introduced by Aaronson and Kuperberg in 2007 in their seminal paper that gave a *quantum* oracle separating QMA vs QCMA. Coming up with a classical oracle to do the same has attracted a lot of attention from folks over the years.

John gave an epic 2.5 hour whiteboard talk today about the proof, and the ideas used are quite dazzling: Noether's theorem, recording oracles, bosons, ...

Separating QMA from QCMA with a classical oracle We construct a classical oracle proving that, in a relativized setting, the set of languages decidable by an efficient quantum verifier with a quantum witness (QMA) is strictly bigger than those decid...

My student @johnbostanci.bsky.social, Chinmay Nirkhe, Jonas Haferkamp, and Mark Zhandry have put out a tour-de-force paper that shows, relative to a classical oracle, QMA is stronger than QCMA -- i.e., quantum proofs >> classical proofs. Congratulations to the authors! arxiv.org/abs/2511.09551

The list of accepted papers for #QIP2026 is now online at qip2026.lu.lv/programme/ac...

You could also work with Debbie Leung, Richard Cleve, David Gosset, Luke Schaefer, Ashwin Nayak, Norbert Lutkenhaus, Mike Mosca, Christine Muschik or some combination of us if you do theory.

Following *this* reference in turn yields basically a version of the iterative QPE.

Thanks for the reference. I took a closer look at this paper, and first of all it is beautifully written. Second of all I noticed that it mentions off-hand "Also, it should be noted that the QFT, and its inverse, can be implemented in the fault tolerant ‘semiclassical’ way (Griffiths & Niu).

YouTube video by Ryan O'Donnell #60/100: 1-qubit Rotation Estimation: Overview || Quantum Computer Programming in 100 Easy Lessons

I do phase estimation without QFT in my undergrad course. youtu.be/CMqPutlG59c?...

It's just Hadamard test plus binary search.

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Best wishes, Eric.

This is great! Do you know of a good reference for comparing the pros/cons of the QFT version versus the single-ancilla qubit version (complexity, why you would use one versus another)? Patrick Rall's paper alludes to the tradeoffs, but it doesn't give as much detail as I would like.

By Kitaev's algorithm, do you mean the one without QFT?

Is there any reason to teach QFT at all in an intro to quantum computing class? From Patrick Rall's paper on phase estimation, it seems potentially superfluous (arxiv.org/pdf/2103.09717).

But last week I covered the "poor man's" version of phase estimation, which only uses a single ancilla qubit. I am now wondering, why do we need the QFT anyways? Googling around, it seems like in many cases we don't! Is there any reason to QFT-based phase estimation?

Tomorrow I am teaching quantum phase estimation in my Intro to Quantum Computing Class for the seventh time. I was prepared to teach it the standard, textbook, Nielsen and Chuang way: applied controlled unitaries and their powers thereof, apply inverse QFT to the ancillas.

Congrats Clement!

Congratulations Lauritz!

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

The music totally sounds Haar random!

The submission server for #ITCS2026 (which will take place at Bocconi University, Milan, in January 2026) is open!

Submission deadline: Sep 4 (abstracts), Sep 6 (papers)

itcs-conf.org

How fast can (pseudo)random unitaries be implemented on a quantum computer? O(1) time suffices (provided you can do things like intermediate measurements)! This -and more- is thanks to a superfun collaboration with Ben Foxman, @nat-parham.bsky.social, and @franvasco.bsky.social (all PhD students!).

Donation link here: www.ipam.ucla.edu/news/nsf-fun...

Sausages and cheese, German supermarket

the scenario we all feared

Come for the iconic papers and eye-wateringly beautiful textbooks, stay for the stories "from the trenches" (of which I hope John posts more of!). Keep writing, @johnwatrous.bsky.social !

Quantum Scientists Have Built a New Math of Cryptography | Quanta Magazine In theory, quantum physics can bypass the hard mathematical problems at the root of modern encryption. A new proof shows how.

Out today in @quantamagazine.bsky.social: a new path toward building quantum cryptography on much harder problems than the ones used for classical encryption. Fascinating stuff!

From our very thoughtful law school colleague, David Pozen, a first take on the Columbia deal.
balkin.blogspot.com/2025/07/regu...

I can almost smell the sea air from reading that...

Welcome! (What do you mean by inconveniently located??)

Agreed. Reminds me that I have no idea what it is but I keep hearing my colleagues talk about Rowhammer.