Simons Foundation

Foveated metamers of the early visual system

Abstract The ability of humans to discriminate and identify spatial patterns varies across the visual field, and is generally worse in the periphery than in the fovea. This decline in performance is revealed in many kinds of tasks, from detection to recognition. A parsimonious hy...

Limits to black-box amplification in QMA

We study the limitations of black-box amplification in the quantum complexity class Q M A . Amplification is known to boost any inverse-polynomial gap between completeness and soundness to exponentially small error, and a recent result (Jeffery and Witteveen, 2025) shows that com...

Gibbs state preparation for commuting Hamiltonian: Mapping to classical Gibbs sampling

Gibbs state preparation, or Gibbs sampling, is a key computational technique extensively used in physics, statistics, and other scientific fields. Recent efforts for designing fast mixing Gibbs samplers for quantum Hamiltonians have largely focused on commuting local Hamiltonians...

Coherent terahertz magnon–phonon three-wave mixing in a layered antiferromagnet

The coherent nonlinear dynamics between collective excitations, such as magnons and phonons, drive emergent phenomena in quantum materials, yet their direct observation remains limited. Here, using double-terahertz-pump optical-probe spectroscopy, we report the direct observation...

Streamlining analysis and design of two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy using machine learning

Two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy (2DES) offers unique insights into the coupling between electronic and nuclear motion and dynamics, making it a key technique in diverse fields, including materials science and biology. Obtaining 2DES data requires a series of measurements...