Programme:

The next Quisco meeting will be held at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh on Monday November 16th in room G03 at the Forum's ground floor.

Attendance is free. For catering purposes, please email ekashefi@gmail.com to register.

Abstracts:

Shashank Virmani
A pedagogical introduction to some ideas behind surface codes. I'll talk about the first few pages of Kitaev's landmark early paper on anyonic quantum computation. It will be entirely pedagogical. I'll assume a basic knowledge of qubits, pauli matrices, but nothing about topology. Topics covered will include some subset of: Euler characteristic, genus, stabilizer quantum error correction, and toopologically determined spectral properties of some Hamiltonians.

Patrick Ohberg
The Topological Quantum Computing toolbox: a tutorial. This talk will be a tutorial on some of the key building blocks which are needed for Topological Quantum Computing. We will describe concepts such as non-Abelian anyons, braiding and fusing mechanisms. At the end we will put these ideas into a broader context, and discuss what the ideas from topological quantum computing can tell us about other physical scenarios.

Amin Coja-Oghlan
Random constraint satisfaction problems Random instances of constraint satisfaction problems such as k-SAT provide challenging bench- marks. If there are m constraints over n variables there is typically a large range of densities r = m/n where solutions are known to exist with probability close to one due to non-constructive arguments. However, no algorithms are known to find solutions efficiently with a non-vanishing probability at even much lower densities. This fact appears to be related to phase transition phenomena that have been studied in statistical mechanics (spin glass theory).

Simon Perdrix
Information Flow in Secret Sharing Protocols. The multipartite entangled graph states have emerged as an elegant and powerful quantum resource, indeed almost all multiparty protocols can be written in terms of graph states including measurement based quantum computation (MBQC), error correction and secret sharing amongst others. In addition they are at the forefront in terms of implementations. As such they represent an excellent opportunity to move towards integrated protocols involving many of these elements. In this talk we introduce a set of secret sharing protocols using graph states, and we look at expressing and extending these protocols and MBQC in a common framework and graphical language related to Flow. Through this we are then able to use graph theoretical results to make clear the constraints certain access structures have. Futher, this common framework gives a way to integrate secret sharing with computation and other tasks, and points us towards ways of using these ideas to develop fault tolerant procedures. This is joint work with Elham Kashefi, Damian Markham and Mehdi Malla.

Directions
The School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh can be found here