Search Talks

In models of inflation driven by an axion-like pseudoscalar field, the inflaton, a, may couple to the standard model hypercharge gauge field via a Chern-Simons-type interaction, L ⊃ a F F̃. This coupling results in the explosive production of hypermagnetic fields during inflation, which has two interesting consequences: (1) The primordial hypermagnetic field is maximally helical. It is therefore capable of sourcing the generation of nonzero baryon number around the electroweak phase transition (via the chiral anomaly in the standard model). (2) The gauge field production during inflation feeds back into the stochastic background of gravitational waves (GWs). In this talk, I am going to discuss the correlation between these two phenomena. To this end, I will (a) present an updated study of baryogenesis via hypermagnetic fields after pseudoscalar inflation and (b) describe the corresponding implications for GWs. As it turns out, successful baryogenesis is feasible---provided the axion coupling to the gauge fields is suppressed by a decay constant \Lambda ~ 3 x 10^17 GeV. Moreover, in the case of successful baryogenesis, one expects a characteristic peak in the GW spectrum at frequencies in the MHz range

Transversality is one of the most desirable features of fault-tolerant circuits because it automatically limits the propagation of errors. However, it was shown by Eastin & Knill that no universal set of quantum gates on any quantum code is transversal. In this talk, we strengthen this result for stabilizer codes to say that transversal gates must in fact be contained in the Clifford hierarchy. Moreover, we present new circuits on Bacon-Shor codes that saturate our bounds. In particular, we show how a k-qubit controlled-Z gate can be implemented by a transversal circuit on m-by-m^k Bacon-Shor codes and provide some estimates of its performance in terms of pseudo-thresholds and resource overhead.

The unrenormalised energy momentum tensor is both huge and fluctuating from point to point. Taking this seriously we (Qingdi Wang, Zhen Zhu, and myself) argue that the slow exponential expansion of the universe (on time scales of 10^10 years) comes from a very weak parametric resonance induced by the fluctuating energy mementum tensor on the rapidly fluctuating scale factor (on time scales much shorter than the Planck scale). We see only the slow exponential growth because we avarage over the scale factor squared.