Pedro Figueroa-Romero

It pains me to say this, but if you are not a US citizen, you should not attend scientific conferences in the US, visit US institutions, or otherwise travel to our country.

Right now it's not worth the risk.

Hopefully that will change. If it doesn't, science in the US is sunk anyway.

Spotted in Sydney – quantum thermo entrepreneurs taking over the local market 🙃🔥

Qolab Emerges from Stealth Mode with John Martinis | The New Quantum Era | Episode 48 Welcome to episode 48 of The New Quantum Era podcast! Another episode recorded at the APS Global Summit in March, today's special guest is true quantum pioneer, John Martinis, co-founder and CTO of Qo...

Very interesting discussion with John Martinis about the challenge of scaling up superconducting quantum processors and the business plan of QoLab.

share.transistor.fm/s/f599d74b

Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go.

Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go.

Existential Kids How did I get inside my body?

“What’s the best question a kid ever asked you?” When the writer Sarah Manguso tweeted this, she received a deluge of responses. See some of the answers, with illustrations by the cartoonist Liana Finck.

Portrait-oriented photo featuring a wooden post with a rusted hanger hook jutting out of it, and standing atop the post, triumphant and at least slightly indignant, is a plump little bluebird. The bluebird is a male, and we see the electric blue of his head, but the predominant part facing us is the coppery-orange and pale white front. He is standing amidst little pink-and-red tree blossoms, but I like to imagine these are instead the extracted organs of his enemies. So let's just pretend this bluebird stands vengefully astride a scattering of viscera -- gobbets of gore taken as a prize from his unnatural and invasive foes. I'm sorry I've really made this a gross photo. It's actually quite nice. Kind of a dreamy vibe to it, what with the wall of yellow forsythia blurring in the background, and here I am adding drippy bits and internal organs. I'm sorry. I'll do better next time. Probably. Photo by me, Chuck Wendig

Everything is bad but birds are good so time to reinstitute BIRD PROTOCOL where a bird is deployed to offset endless evil vibes, please enjoy, birds are good, okay bye

(photo by me)

Tile Codes: High-Efficiency Quantum Codes on a Lattice with Boundary We introduce tile codes, a simple yet powerful way of constructing quantum codes that are local on a planar 2D-lattice. Tile codes generalize the usual surface code by allowing for a bit more flexibil...

QEC paper with IQM authors the highest Scited (hitherto) for today! 🧐 scirate.com/arxiv/2504.0...

We also recently added a whole-device bipartite entanglement benchmark (based on arXiv:2102.11521), where one can verify whether native cluster states on a given IQM device are entangled across any qubit bipartition. A sample execution (for a good calibration): iqm-finland.github.io/iqm-benchmar...

The latest addition I got to merge was Error Per Layered Gate (EPLG - based on arXiv:2311.05933), which lower-bounds the average 2-qubit gate error in the context of a given layer. A sample execution (for a below-average calibration): iqm-finland.github.io/iqm-benchmar...

What remains open is IQM Benchmarks, though, a Python package we developed with several standard circuit-level QCVV techniques for easy execution with IQM's hardware and simulators 🧑‍💻 iqm-finland.github.io/iqm-benchmar...

Weird how different it is finishing on a (quantum computing) job in industry vs academia: it's like suddenly being exiled and missing out ENTIRELY on all the technical tittle-tattle and industry goss 😒

🚀🚀

Not bullshit

Shout out to all the fuckwits who told me, two months ago, that scientists must strive to remain apolitical.

The deadline for talk submissions at QCTiP 2025 is coming up! Consider submitting a talk until January 10.

Screenshot of SNL's George Washington sketch from 10/28 with Nate Bargatze

Around 700 BCE ‘January’ and ‘February’ were added to the calendar, initially placed at the end of the year. When these two months were later bumped to the front of the calendar, ‘September,’ ‘October,’ ‘November,’ and ‘December’ found themselves at odds with their roots.

Alas, QCVV too often seems to be reduced to mean "benchmarking", mostly within the quantum computing industry, but seems to me like the author ends up doing the same here to a great extent.

Stumbled upon this perspective on QCVV (quantum characterization, verification, and validation), which has an admittedly "overly sensationalized title" 😅 but still quite interesting for the history (which I largely ignored)! buttondown.com/xgranade/arc...

Farmland in the background, a short-eared owl poses on a post marked "property boundary".

How better to start off the new year than with a glorious short-eared owl? 🪶

Welcome to 2025:
International Year of Quantum Science and Technology

Time zones are fascinating. Australia is already in 2025, Europe is still 2024, and the USA is currently in 1939.

The firework situation in Germany is quite wild, seems even worse to me than what I experienced in Mexico City growing up. Honestly I don't get it. Like, I do, but I don't 😮‍💨

A black crow struts across a wooden deck

Head into next week with the confidence of a crow. 🪶

You don't say

Guess I've got a new success margin of ±10% yearly distance 🫣

Beyond NISQ: The Megaquop Machine On December 11, I gave a keynote address at the Q2B 2024 Conference in Silicon Valley. This is a transcript of my remarks. The slides I presented are here. NISQ and beyond I’m honored to be back at…

I created a transcript of my talk at the Q2B Conference: "Beyond NISQ: The Megaquop Machine." You can read it here:

quantumfrontiers.com/2024/12/14/b...

Thanks to all the atheists out there just doing the right thing without me threatening you with fire and brimstone.

And now they're all about the Multiverse juicy steak! 🤤

New paper with colleagues at IQM 🎉
We introduce Multi-Layer Cycle Benchmarking (MLCB), an enhanced noise characterisation protocol that improves the learnability associated with effective Pauli noise models by jointly analysing multiple layers of Clifford gates:

Learning to latte art is such a struggle. At least I'm past the 🍆 stage now 😂