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Zesting is a construction that takes a (2+1)D topological order and produces a new one by changing the fusion rules of its anyons. We'll discuss properties of zesting from a physical and computational point of view and explain how the theory produces some closely related families of topological orders, like Kitaev's 16-fold way and modular isotopes. Time permitting we'll cover a generalization of zesting to symmetry-enriched topological order and comment on connections to fusion 2-categories.

Many quantum platforms naturally host Hamiltonians with power-law or even all-to-all connectivity, which may potentially process quantum information in a way much faster than conventional gate-based models. For such non-geometrically-local Hamiltonians, it is then important to both come up with fast protocols and understand the ultimate limit for realizing various information processing tasks. In this talk, I will first overview this quantum speed limit topic, and then dive into the particular task of quantum routing, i.e. permuting unknown quantum states on the qubits. I aim to show [1] a provably optimal Hamiltonian routing protocol on the star graph that is asymptotically faster than gate-based routing; [2] a lower bound on the time to realize the shift unitary using 1d power-law interactions which, perhaps surprisingly, can be much slower than the time for the conventional Lieb-Robinson light cone to spread across the whole system. The latter result shares interesting connections to the classification of 1d quantum cellular automata and symmetry-protected topological order.

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The state-sum invariants of 4d manifolds obtained from spherical fusion 2-categories due to Douglas-Reutter offer an exciting entrypoint to the study of 4d TQFTs. In this talk we will argue that these invariants arise from a TQFT, obtained by filling the trivial 4d TQFT with a defect foam. Such construction is known as a generalised orbifold, the Turaev-Viro-Barrett-Westbury (i.e. 3d state-sum) models are also known to arise in this way from the defects in the trivial 3d TQFT (a result by Carqueville-Runkel-Schaumann). Advantages of this point of view offer e.g. realisations of state-spaces, examples of domain walls and commuting-projector realisations of (3+1)-dimensional topological phases. Based on a joint project with Nils Carqueville and Lukas Müller.