PHYSICS DISSERTATION DEFENSE: Noah Shutty

Ph.D. Candidate:  Noah Shutty

Research Advisor:  Mary Wootters and Patrick Hayden

Date: August 25, 2022
Time: 10:30 am

Location: PAB 102/103

Zoom Link:  https://stanford.zoom.us/j/97787830991

Zoom Password: email nickswan [at] stanford.edu (nickswan[at]stanford[dot]edu) for password

 

Title: Nonlocal Games, Distributed Storage, and Quantum Error Correction: A Journey through Fault-Tolerant Computation

Abstract: We consider three computing systems afflicted by noise, which causes their behavior to deviate unpredictably from idealized theoretical models. In each system, we model the effects of noise, and characterize the extent to which fault-tolerance techniques allow the computation to proceed efficiently despite these effects. First, we consider two parties who wish to implement a computation with little communication by making use of nonlocal correlations, a task called nonlocal computation. Second, we investigate a data center computing scenario where data are stored across many nodes in an error-correcting code, and we wish to evaluate functions of this data despite unpredictable node failures. Third, we consider building a fault-tolerant quantum computer using near-term hardware, in which qubits are afflicted by a high rate of noise, and two-qubit gates are constrained to act on pairs of nearby qubits in a planar layout. In the first two systems, we aim to minimize the communication cost. In the third system, we aim to minimize the space and time overhead cost. We show both positive and negative results that better characterize the trade-off between noise level and efficiency in these three systems.