Author Archives: Thomas

About Thomas

I am a professor in the department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences (CMS) at the California Institute of Technology, where I am also a member of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM). My research is in quantum complexity theory and cryptography.

A Masters project

Posted on January 14, 2020

In a previous post I reported on the beautiful recent result by Natarajan and Wright showing the astounding power of multi-prover interactive proofs with quantum provers sharing entanglement: in letters, . In this post I want to report on follow-up … Continue reading →

Posted in meta, QPCP, Quantum, Science | Tagged , , , | 27 Comments

Randomness and interaction? Entanglement ups the game!

Posted on April 14, 2019

[05/25/19 Update: Kevin Hartnett has a nice article at Quanta explaining Natarajan & Wright’s result in slightly more layman terms than I’d be able to…see here: Computer Scientists Expand the Frontier of Verifiable Knowledge] The study of entanglement through the … Continue reading →

Posted in CHSH, QPCP, Quantum, Uncategorized | Tagged | 8 Comments

The cryptographic leash

Posted on August 6, 2018

This post is meant as a companion to an introductory post I wrote on the blog of Caltech’s IQIM (Institute for Quantum Information and Matter), of which I am a member. The post describes a “summer cluster” on quantum computation … Continue reading →

Posted in Conferences, QCrypto, Simons | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

UCSD Spring school on Quantum Computation

Posted on January 23, 2018

A couple months from now Dorit Aharonov, David Gosset and myself will be giving a short 3.5-day “Spring School” that is meant to be an introduction to recent topics in quantum computing, directed at young researchers in theoretical computer science at large. The school is … Continue reading →

Posted in Quantum, teaching | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

A beginner’s guide to PC chairing

Posted on August 7, 2017

I recently had the privilege to serve as program committee (PC) chair for the yearly conference on quantum cryptography, QCRYPT’17 (note: for obvious public-relations reasons all names of conferences, PC members and authors in this post have been replaced by entirely fictional aliases). Although … Continue reading →

Posted in Conferences, Jobs, QCrypto | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Pauli braiding

Posted on June 28, 2017

[7/9/17 Update: Following a suggestion by Oded Regev I upgraded Section 1 from “probabilistic functions” to “matrix-valued functions”. This hopefully makes it a more useful, and interesting, mid-point between the classical analysis of BLR and the non-abelian extension discussed afterwards. … Continue reading →

Posted in CHSH, device independence, QPCP, Quantum, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Unitary Correlation Matrices

Posted on April 20, 2017

Today I’d like to sketch a question that’s been pushing me in a lot of different directions over the past few years — some sane, others less so; few fruitful, but all instructive. The question is motivated by the problem … Continue reading →

Posted in Conferences, Quantum, Science, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 2 Comments