Hello! 👋
PhD student at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
I'm a first-year PhD student in Prof. Alex May's group at the Perimeter Insitute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. I completed my BSc in the Honours Mathematics and Physics program at McGill University in 2024, and wrote my thesis in Gaussian Unitary Simulation with Symmetrically Extendible Channels under the supervision of Prof. Patrick Hayden (Stanford University) and Prof. Alex Maloney (McGill University). When I first entered the field of Quantum Information theory in 2021, I worked in Quantum Key Distribution at the National Research Council of Canada and the Institute for Quantum Computing -- and while I still maintain roots in cryptography, my main areas of interest are quantum communication theory, entanglement theory, and resource theories.
I try to remind myself to sustain a life outside of physics. To this end, I devote some evenings to my favourite wordsmiths (Kurt Vonnegut, Rita Dove, Maggie Smith, Harold Bloom, Lionel Trilling, to name a few), and more rarely to my own (much less-successful) configuring of words. My most frequent modality of consumption is poetry or poetic criticism.
Note: all of the above endevours are graciously tolerated by my sweet bundle of chaos Margot the
Anything in Quantum Error Correction, fault tolerance
Causing mayhem, eating the covers of great works of literature, sharing her opinion when no one asked
I formulated a simple condition that describes exactly when it is possible to achieve a positive asymptotic secret key rate for the Device-Independent Repetition-Code Protocol. This condition was based on the Quantum Chernoff Divergence, a quantity that arises in symmetric hypothesis testing.
I developed a security proof for a variation of the RRDPS quantum key distribution protocol that implements an arbitrarily large encoding alphabet. The design of our scheme allows the users to optimize protocol parameters to adapt to a large range of different experimental conditions, resulting in higher key rates and better noise tolerance. Furthermore, this approach can provide insight into bridging the gap between seemingly incompatible quantum communication schemes by leveraging the unique information encoding approaches of both HD and DPS QKD.
If Alice and Bob aim to perform a non-local quantum communication (NLQC) task under strict resource constraints, they require pre-shared entanglement. For tasks represented by a global unitary in an LOCC setting, the required entanglement is at least the amount generated by the unitary. However, entanglement requirements are less clear when quantum communication is permitted, as entanglement can be generated or shared mid-protocol. My focus is on entanglement bounds for NLQC tasks when Alice and Bob are restricted to a single simultaneous exchange of quantum communication.
Fault tolerant quantum computers are capable of running quantum algorithms that possess a significant advantage over their classical counterparts, like Shor and Grover's algorithms, but it is unlikely that they will become a reality in the next decade. To achieve a quantum advantage in the near term, it is crucial to explore different types of quantum algorithms, like variational ones, or to modify current algorithms by techniques such as circuit cutting, to make their execution possible on NISQ devices.
Fundamental to Computational Complexity Theory is the classification of problems based on their hardness, where hardness is typically a measure of resource requirements to solve the problem, like time and memory. Quantum Computational Complexity Theory investigates the relationships between complexity classes when problems can be solved with quantum strategies. In particular, an interesting and essential avenue of research is the investigation of problems that can be solved in polynomial time with quantum strategies but not with classical ones.