Create 2023-10-27-Friday-October-27th.md

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+## SQuInT Day 2
+
+## Today was Day 2
+- We continued with talks, but I wasn't able to see the keynote, because of a research meeting I had to
+attend. I also had to work on a paper for another project, but as it turns out, my meeting ended a bit early,
+so I was able to make it to some of the morning talks, but I had just missed breakfast! I made it out just
+in time to catch a break, and they did have some snacks to keep me until lunch time.
+- Tonight was also the banquet! That was a lot of fun, and it's interesting that because the group was
+so friendly, people were more willing to just sit at any table and strike up a conversation, versus
+in some conferences where people just sit next to other people they know. It's especially true with
+people working in industry; not only do they work with each other, but they often don't socialize
+outside of the other people in their labs at some conferences, which is a bit of a shame. At the same
+time, having worked in industry, I also understand a bit of that; there may be things that are just
+easier to let your guard down on if you know that your coworkers share your understanding (e.g. on things
+you can't talk about because they are internal, etc), but at the same time, it's always a bit weird
+that like, a bunch of people from a company will literally just hang out with each other for the majority
+of the conference (you might as well have just stayed in the office?).
+
+## Anyways
+- I saw a talk on Simulating Classical Harmonic Oscillators using quantum computers, which was really
+fascinating, by Nathan. He spoke about mechanical systems and differential equations, and about the
+"paper in Quantum no one wants you to read", aka another paper by Grover (of Grover's Search) that is
+on mechanical interference, and how it can be used to achieve a Grover speedup. Of course, we can't
+error-correct these things but they have good ideas. So the question then becomes, how similar /
+can we argue that mechanical interference is equivalent to quantum interference?
+He also showed an example of block encoding such that if we let we can construct a large superposition
+over an ancilla state, and use qubitization to model simulation in the Hamiltonian. The claim is that
+simulating exponentially large systems of oscillators is BQP-complete.
+We note that we can simulate classical computer oscillation on a quantum computer but we can't do
+exponentially large classical simulation on a classical computer.
+- We use this dilation trick to deal with negatives from our hadamard space gate and he mentioned this
+really interesting problem from the Childs paper on Glued Trees, and how it related to his original
+mechanical oscillators problem.
+- Nicholas spoke about Quantum computing of stopping power for inertial fusion target design. The
+question is whether only the most highly entangled systems promising applications of quantum simluation?
+He explained stoppiong power,defined as S(E), in which a frictional force is experienced by a particle
+(projectile) traversing matter (target).
+- I really liked NASA guy's talk, which included a fair dosage of Quantum Field Theory. He mentioned
+LCUs which are linear combinations of unitaries, and their decomposition leading to better gate
+complexities. His talk was on Quantum Algorithms for Simulating the Lattice Schwinger Model, where
+we represent some equal weight LCUs with some equal weight of positive and negative 1 values. He
+also mentioned the Gibson Adder, which is described in the paper "Halving the cost of quantum
+addition" by Gidney (2018), and a paper on the Grand Unification of Quantum Algos, that I haven't
+read yet.
+- Another interesting talk was by Rahul on Efficient QA for Testing Symmetries of Open Quantum Systems.
+He describes an open system as having an initial state to an evolved state (he used the example of a
+gust of wind such that our initial state goes to our evolved state by some interaction with its
+environment. He mentioned symmetry breaking, and his talk was composed of these four ideas:
+symmetry quantum states, channels, Lindbladians and measurements. He mentioned why Symmetry is
+important, as an example being Noether's Theorem. And then he explained how it can be leveraged
+to eliminate degrees of a system or to express dynamics, and how we can use quantum computers
+to learn symmetries. I find this interesting as there seems to be a lot of interest in general
+in these themes of symmetry (Google guy gave a talk relating to that yesterday), which is highly
+applicable to two projects I am working on. Rahul used the Hilbert Schmidt norm and mentioned this
+"Destructive Swap test" paper. It's very interesting and for another project, we do have some
+degree of swapping that I need to understand more deeply, as these "sum of Bell states" properties
+can be generally used for swaps and speedups. Rahul also spoke about Symmetry and Unitary gruop
+representation, thinking about Pauli operators. He mentioned a Twirl channel as representing
+some action in a group, which I thought was really interesting, understanding actions in a group
+in my knowledge so far as general permutations (at least in Mathematics), so it's nice to have
+some kind of representation in quantum. He also mentioned the Choi states of the channel and how that
+relates to the equality of choi states. He then showed the Lindblad Master equation and gave examples
+for testing the symmetry of Lindbladians, and commutation with unitaries. He them spoke a bit about
+the Two-Qubit Spin Chain, and how that system has an expectation of symmetry in one operation, and
+asymmetry in another.
+- LANL guy spoke about QAOA vs QA, but at that point, I was finishing up some work to submit to a
+conference!
+- Anyways, today was pretty great, although I did spend about a good two hours in the afternoon
+taking a nap before coming back down for the banquet dinner.
+- Finally, I took some photos of some posters I found interesting. A lot of my interest in general
+is somewhere between the intersection of Pure Mathematics (Number Theory, Algebraic Graph Theory)
+and Quantum, with some sort of application to cryptography. There aren't that many Pure Mathematicians
+around, though, but as my advisor says, just tell them "I'm right here!" :)
+- Nathan's talk had me thinking a lot, and I loved his quote today that "when the going gets tough,
+the tough goes to a higher dimensional Hilbert space".
+- Anyways, my notes that I actually wrote my hand are for more detailed, with a lot more mathematical
+notation, so that's all I have for now.
+
+## Photos
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1231.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1232.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1233.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1234.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1235.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1236.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1237.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1238.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1239.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1240.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1241.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1242.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1243.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1244.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1245.png" width="300">
+
+<img src="/images1/squint231/squint1246.png" width="300">
+
+## Other
+- I got invited to review for a workshop, will get back to my research fully when I get back in two days,
+and am even going to be involved in an upcoming quantum blog post through a discord group I'm in!
+I'm learning a lot and having a lot of fun, and I really like the community so far (at least, the good parts!).
+- I do know that I'm still in many ways an outsider, but I have strength to persist in a way that I don't
+think is as frustrating as some of my experiences near the early parts of my PhD; this feels a lot more
+long-term for me. Plus, I get to be part of the Pure Maths community and I don't have to choose.
+- I realized that I never had to choose the other day, and that a lot of the pressure I felt to do that
+was based on the insecurity of other people; I was seen as a threat. So I'm just going to keep to myself
+and my community and to continue doing my work, letting those people's opinions just roll off.
+- In retrospect, considering my background (I was very good at what I did before grad school, but I also
+had to work my way from the bottom up!)
+- , and my institution (which is nothing to write home about!), I'm pretty darned proud that I'm seen
+as a threat, to be honest, that must mean I'm pretty awesome haha and made a big
+enough splash worth noticing. And it's not my fault that some people
+can't handle that, and I shouldn't try to dim my light so that they can manage their feelings; that's something
+they have to learn to do on their own!
+- Until then, things have been great, and I'm looking forward to the next adventure!
+
+## And that's it