Finding the fingerprints of noisy distributions in random quantum systems

By Perimeter Institute 

Imagine shuffling a deck of cards where some of the cards are fading just because of the way they interact with the external environment as you shuffle them.

Your job is to figure out the interplay between the shuffling or “imposed randomness” due to the way you shuffle your cards, and how that relates to the fading as cards are exposed to the external environment.

That’s a rough analogy for what Matthew Duschenes and his PhD advisors were doing in a paper that received an Editors’ Suggestion in the American Physical Society (APS) journal Physical Review A. An Editors’ Suggestion denotes a paper of importance, impact, and intrinsic interest.

Duschenes is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Guelph, and he earned his PhD at Perimeter Institute and the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) with the late Ray Laflamme, a Perimeter founding faculty member and founding director of the Institute for Quantum Computing, who passed away in 2025. 

The paper bears the names of Laflamme and other advisors — Juan Carrasquilla, a Perimeter visiting fellow who is currently at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, and Roger Melko, a Perimeter associate faculty member who is also at the University of Waterloo.