Create 2023-10-26-Thursday-October-26th.md

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+## My first SQuInT and trip to NM
+
+## I'm currently at SQuInT, but what is it?
+- It's a SouthWest Symposium in Quantum, and so far it's been awesome! (day 1)
+- I got in really late last night after three flights, and the computer system in the hotel had gone down,
+so they had to manually check me in, but they were so nice, and super efficient, and the check-in process
+was fantastic. People were also really nice; my ride from the airport was also really nice; I asked the driver
+about places to eat, places to go, and the general economy of the area, and it was just really great.
+
+## Turn around
+- So I got to bed around 1am, but realized that the symposium was also in the same hotel where I was staying,
+which meant I could sleep in until 7 and go down for 7:30am breakfast. Once I went down to the eating area,
+I realized I knew two people from other workshops / conferences, including someone I was working with on
+a current project, who lives in California and was presenting a poster. This is my first year, and I got
+a fellowship to attend, so I'm super thrilled. My goal for next year would be to present a poster, which
+I think given the scope of what I'm currently working on, I could probably do (the deadline this year
+was in August, so by the time I found out about the workshop during summer school, it was too close
+to the deadline!). That being said, I'm also submitting to some other things at the moment, and it's
+been a super busy semester for me in general, juggling so many projects, but also very rewarding and
+I think that this (what I'm doing now) is what I want to stick with in terms of the community and what I like doing.
+- The community is intimate, and full of theorists, and people are nice, and it's really felt like a great fit
+for me and the projects I've been working on.
+- In the evening was the poster session. So definitely going to visit my collaborator's poster! She also
+gave me a really great resource for a current problem I'm tackling, too!
+
+## Notes
+- The keynote was from Bill. The question: Have we seen a demonstration of experimental quantum advantage?
+We want to find problems that can be solved using a near-term quantum experiment that are classically hard
+to solve i.e. they can't be solved in polynomial time. And we want our solution to be efficiently verified
+with a classical computer with minimal trust in the experiment. Quantum has focused on "sampling problems"
+in which the goal is to sample from a complicated distribution. Current experiments are not scalable
+and the verification is not efficient and noise causes the signal to rapidly decay.
+- The Goldilocks parameter: these issues force the current quantum advantage candidates to find this.
+Stockmeyer reduction and P-sharp hard problems. Lipton ('91) shows the average case hardness of permanent
+vs random nature. Questions: How close are the output distribution of noisy (i.e. depolarizing) random curcuit
+and uniform distribution?
+- The anti-concentration property: means that we are not concentrated in one area, is sufficiently spread.
+It is a property of sufficiently deep random quantum circuits.
+- Open: In recent work (Ghosh et al, 23), we show that circuit distributions never anti-concentrate for
+random circuits with hybrid noise.
+- Measure and Forget Dynamics in Random Circuits: we measure, but "Forget" the outcome. We "dephase" and
+"forget" the matrix. Application on Yoshida's Decoding Protocol. See "How Dynamical Quantum Memories Forget"
+by Fidkowski et al, and "Decoding the Entanglement Structure of Monitored Quantum Circuits" by Yoshida.
+This method focuses on Clifford, not Haar circuits.
+- Shivan's talk on "Arbitrary Random Quantum Circuits from Unitary Designs". Unitary designs are modelled
+as random walk. How close is this distribution to normal uniform distribution? One step random walk related
+to the spectral gap of the 2-local, frustration-free Hamiltonian. Generalizing Knabe method for Spectral
+gap. First approach uses a star-graph approach versus the spanning-tree graph (Dectectability Lemma) and the
+Quantum Union Bound (we relate this to the spanning tree to a 1D graph). I really liked this talk and will
+check out the paper!
+- Tobias's talk on "A Wannier-Stark Optical Lattice Clock with Extended Coherence times". Goal of precision
+in say, meteorology. We distinguish between accuracy and precision, where accuracy is defined as relating
+to how centred we are on a target and precision thinks about the spread. Intro to atomic clocks using
+Strontium, where ```v_0``` is our oscillator frequency. (Tobias also showed another possible Yterbium
+clock, I believe by NIST). We also saw an example of perturbation on our clock measurement on the Bloch
+sphere.
+- Hayden gave a talk on "Portable Atomic Clocks" (from Sandia). Question: What is the tradeoff in
+size/ weight / power for something liek a satellite or vehicle atomic clock. Second project after
+the primary TicToc one on Robust Optical Clock Networks.
+- Yu Chen from Google gave a talk on "Beyond classical quantum computing". I had a meeting with my
+abelian varieties problem-set group and then a panel on navigating grad school with some mathematicians,
+so I had to skip a couple talks and then return for the poster session today.
+
+
+## Here are some photos from the first day.
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint1.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint2.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint3.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint4.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint5.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint6.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint7.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint8.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint9.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint10.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint11.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint12.png" width="300">
+
+- Someone was making paper cranes from the black tissues apparently. It's been a very nice
+group of people. We got into talking about Oppenheimer and "American Prometheus" and the
+IAS scene in the movie, as well as the 1937 paper that was mentioned in the movie, but that
+didn't really add to the movie, which was hilarious. People had strong thoughts!
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint13.png" width="300">
+
+- Some very good flan! We also had tostadas and some other good food for lunch!
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint14.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint23/squint15.png" width="300">
+
+## And that's it