About

My name is Xinyu Tan (谭欣雨) and I also go by Norah. I am a third-year Ph.D. student at MIT Math, advised by Peter Shor and Aram Harrow. In 2022, I graduated from Duke University with highest distinctions in both Mathematics and Computer Science, and I was fortunated to be advised by Robert Calderbank and Jianfeng Lu.

I am currently interested in quantum error-correction and fault-tolerance (click here for a photo of “Calderbank-Shor-Norah”). Although seemingly unrelated, I also work a lot on unitary designs.

Email: norahtan (at) mit (dot) edu

Related Experiences

• I was a visiting graduate student for the Quantum Algorithms, Complexity, and Fault-Tolerance Program at the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley in Spring 2024.
• I was a Graduate Teaching Assistant for Nicolas Delfosse’s Quantum LDPC codes minicourse at IAS PCMI summer school 2023.
• In Summer 2022, I was a research intern at Alibaba Quantum Group in Seattle, WA.
• I am a proud co-founder of Duke Undergraduate Quantum Information Society (DuQIS) together with Catherine Liang.
• Some wise person once said: “Love quantum mechanics, love the cats.” Click here for some featured photos of my cat Coco.

Publications

*: authors are in alphabetical order

• Permutation gates in the third level of the Clifford hierarchy
  *Zhiyang He, Luke Robitaille, Xinyu Tan
  [arXiv]

• Incompressibility and spectral gaps of random circuits
  *Chi-Fang Chen, Jeongwan Haah, Jonas Haferkamp, Yunchao Liu, Tony Metger, Xinyu Tan
  [arXiv] [Yunchao’s 𝕏 post] [slides]

• Efficient approximate unitary designs from random Pauli rotations
  *Jeongwan Haah, Yunchao Liu, Xinyu Tan
  65th IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) 2024
  [arXiv] [MIT QI Seminar]

• Scalable Surface-Code Decoders with Parallelization in Time
  Xinyu Tan, Fang Zhang, Rui Chao, Yaoyun Shi, Jianxin Chen
  PRX Quantum (2023)
  6th International Conference on Quantum Error Correction (QEC 2023) invited talk
  Simons Institute Workshop, Advances in Quantum Coding Theory (2024)
  [arXiv] [PRX Quantum] [Rui’s talk at QEC] [talk at Simons]

• Approximate unitary 3-designs from transvection Markov chains
  Xinyu Tan, Narayanan Rengaswamy, Robert Calderbank
  Designs, Codes and Cryptography (2022)
  [arXiv] [DCC]

• Power spectra of constrained codes with level-based signaling: Overcoming finite-length challenges
  Jessica Centers, Xinyu Tan, Ahmed Hareedy, Robert Calderbank
  IEEE Transactions on Communications (2021)
  12th Non-Volatile Memories Workshop (NVMW 2021) Memorable Paper Award Finalist in the ECC and Devices category
  [arXiv] [TCOM] [talk at NVMW]