Physics (Internal)

Summer Student Seminar

This event is part of the Graduate Student Council Events.

Deniz Aybas (CME/Photonics): Searching for Axion Dark Matter with Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

The nature of dark matter is an open question in fundamental physics. One of the candidates for dark matter is a particle called axion. The Cosmic Axion Spin Precession Experiment (CASPEr) searches for nuclear spin precession in an axion field using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and precision magnetometry techniques. We will talk about the design and development of this laboratory scale experiment at Boston University.

Shiyu Zhou (CMT): Single T gate in a Clifford circuit drives transition to universal entanglement spectrum statistics

Clifford circuits are insufficient for universal quantum computation. While the entanglement entropy is not a telltale of this insufficiency, the entanglement spectrum is: the entanglement levels are Poisson-distributed for circuits restricted to the Clifford gate-set, while the levels follow Wigner-Dyson statistics when universal gates are used. We show, using finite-size scaling analysis of different measures of level spacing statistics, that in the thermodynamic limit, inserting a single T (π/8) gate in the middle of a random Clifford circuit is sufficient to alter the entanglement spectrum from a Poisson to a Wigner-Dyson distribution.