As the eventful semester comes to a close, we’re thrilled to announce our guest of honour for the Spring Semester: Prof. Andrew Steane !
✨ Quantum Paper Club x Theory Talks Capstone Talk: Free barbecue and drinks afterwards ✨
🙋 Where ? ETH Hönggerberg, HCI J3
🕡 When ? Thursday, 21.05.2026 at 16:30
🎓 Title: Unlocking Vacuum Entanglement 🧶
📃 Abstract:
The structure of entanglement in the ground state of the harmonic chain is studied. A class of two-mode squeezed states, useful for this purpose, is identified. The entanglement of the local modes at the ends of the chain, after tracing out the centre, rapidly falls to zero as the length of the chain increases. However, if the central modes are measured, and the result communicated to systems interacting with the outer modes, the latter exhibit greatly enhanced entanglement, including in conditions where none was otherwise available. These ideas can be demonstrated in experiments in trapped ions, among other systems. The extension to the continuous case yields enhanced entanglement extracted from the vacuum state of a bosonic quantum field.
Record attendance alert! 🚨✨ The ETH Quantum Hackathon 2026 was a whirlwind of innovation, happy faces, and groundbreaking ideas. ⚛️
➡️ Swipe through for a glimpse of the highlights from an incredible weekend at @ethzurich !
Congratulations to all the participants and the organising committe of the @quantum_engineering_commission ! 🙌
#ETHZurich #QuantumHackathon #QuantumEngineering
Escaping the quantum realm to enjoy some macroscopic views! 🏔️✨
Yesterday, the Quantum Engineering Commission hit the trails. No quantum tunneling was allowed, we had to climb every meter ourselves, but we definitely experienced some discrete energy level jumps (mostly thanks to trail snacks 🍫).
Thanks to everyone who joined us for a great day of entanglement outside the lab! Swipe to see the highlights. 🥾🌲
Pictures from @nickgioni
#ETHZurich #QuantumEngineering #QEC #SwissAlps
Hello everyone!!
Remember to sign up for the ETH Quantum Hackathon! 🔥
After last years’ demand, we decided to up the ante this year with a new artwork for tshirts and mugs! (and a very early order to combat last years after-event distribution chaos 💀). The merch will be exclusive for participants, so don’t miss out on the fun weekend of hacking and the limited edition merch!
For more informations, link in bio🔥
Curious about Quantum? ⚛️ Come to our Master’s in Quantum Engineering Info Event!
If you’re an undergrad looking to specialize in one of the most exciting fields in tech right now, join us on April 1st to learn about our curriculum, application process, and post-grad career paths.
📅 April 1 2026 | ⏰ 18:00 | 📍 HPF G6
👉 Register now: link in bio
Hey everyone, we are excited to finally announce the awesome new QEC board for next semester😍
From the top left:
Anna (IT👩💻)
Jan (QPC 📄)
Andreas(Events🕺)
Ben(QPC 📄)
Tommaso(Social Media📣)
Daniel(Studies🎓)
Prajwal (QPC 📄)
Manjari (President👑)
Jinlei(VP💸)
*ETH QUANTUM HACKATHON 2026*
📍 *WHERE:* ETH Hönggerberg Campus
📅 *WHEN:* May 8–10, 2026
Ready to hack the future? Join us for a weekend of quantum hacking! 🌍🤯
🚀 Solve real quantum challenges in hardware & software
🤝 Meet like-minded students & industry experts
🏆 Win amazing prizes (2.4k CHF prize pool!)
👩🎓 Open to all students | 💸 10 CHF participation fee | 🍕 Food & drinks included | 🛏️ Sleepover possible
🔗 *REGISTER NOW:* https://forms.gle/uxJPS8TKCLdkJcpu5
ℹ️ *More info:* https://qec.amiv.ethz.ch/qhack26/
Big thanks to our sponsors: QuEra, Quandela, IQM, Alice & Bob, QCentroid, Zurich Instruments and the ETH Quantum Center! 🎉
Experimental results from the Snow weeQend are in: 100% success rate. ❄️🔬🏔️
We successfully tunneled out of the lab and into the mountains of Lenzerheide. What we found:
🎿 Optimal skiing conditions
🥘 Significant cheese-to-human ratios
🎉 Two parties that reached peak energy states
Back in Zürich now and slowly decohering. Huge thanks to everyone who made this weekend an absolute banger! ⛷️✨
#QuantumEngineering #SnowWeeQend #Lenzerheide #LabEscape #PhysicsOnIce
✨ Theory Talks X Quantum Paper Club upcoming session ✨
😃 Who ? Prof. Dr. Renato Renner, Quantum Information Theory Group at ITP, ETH
🎓 Title: Insights from Quantum Foundations into Black Holes
📃 Abstract: Black holes offer a testing ground for the interplay between General Relativity and quantum theory, exemplified by phenomena such as Hawking radiation. Yet, this interplay gives rise to deep puzzles, notably the „firewall paradox“, in which the combined predictions of an infalling observer and an outside observer lead to a contradiction.
In this talk, I will argue that recent advances in quantum foundations suggest an unexpected resolution: the paradox may not be due to a conflict between General Relativity and quantum theory, but rather highlight limitations in quantum theory’s ability to consistently describe scenarios involving multiple observers with differing perspectives.
📃 Article: /abs/2504.03835
🕡 Time: Thursday, 22.05.2025 at 17:45
🏫 Place: ETH Hönggerberg, HPT C 103 (or Zoom, there will be a recording).
✨ Quantum Paper Club’s upcoming Talk ✨
🙋 Where ? ETH Hönggerberg, HIT H42
🕡 When ? THURSDAY, 15.05.2025 at 17:45
😃 Who ? Raquel Garcia Belles, PhD student at HyQu
🎓 Title: Understanding the coherence properties of HBARs in the classical and quantum regimes
📃 Abstract:
High overtone bulk acoustic wave resonators (HBARs) have been successfully integrated with superconducting qubits into hybrid quantum systems with many applications in quantum information technologies. Their success strongly relies on the excellent coherence properties of the mechanical modes. Nevertheless, a full understanding of the limiting loss mechanisms affecting multimode HBAR devices is still missing.
In this talk, I discuss the influence of different loss mechanisms in our HBAR devices, with a particular focus on two-level-system (TLS) loss. I present our characterization of the quality factors of hundreds of mechanical modes in a several-GHz frequency span, and show evidence that TLS loss is present but only has a minimal contribution at low temperatures and powers. This is consistent with the lifetimes measured for the HBAR modes in the quantum regime through a flux tunable superconducting qubit. In addition, the absence of frequency noise caused by TLS enables the coherence times (T2*) to be lifetime (T1) limited, reaching ~1ms without dynamical decoupling. These results highlight the relevance of HBARs as a quantum information processing platform.
✨ Quantum Paper Club’s upcoming Talk ✨
🙋 Where ? ETH Hönggerberg, HIT H42
🕡 When ? THURSDAY, 08.05.2025 at 17:45
😃 Who ? Anqi Gong, PhD student of ETH in the QIT Group
🎓 Title: Introduction to quantum LDPC codes — constructions, decoding and logical gates
📃 Abstract:
Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes have recently attracted significant interest due to their high encoding rates and good distance properties, while still requiring only low-weight stabilizer measurements. In this introductory talk, I will present leading constructions for qLDPC codes, such as the hypergraph-product and lift-product methods, and briefly discuss how the resulting codes can be realized on actual quantum hardware.
I will then introduce two basic decoding techniques—belief propagation (BP) and BP combined with ordered statistics decoding (OSD)—and explain how these can be adapted to the more realistic circuit-level noise model. Numerical studies suggest that qLDPC codes are promising candidates for robust quantum memory. However, implementing fault-tolerant logical gates on these codes remains a major challenge, with all current approaches incurring notable time overhead.
Nevertheless, I will discuss two important techniques—automorphism-based gates and surgery-type gates—for realizing Clifford operations. When combined with magic state distillation and injection for non-Clifford gates, these approaches open a path toward universal quantum computation using qLDPC codes.
