Tag Archives: Zohreh Davoudi

Year of Quantum Across Canada Conference October 6 – 9, 2025, Waterloo, Ontario (call for submissions deadline: Sept. 19, 2025)

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A September 9, 2025 Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) notice (received via email) announces a quantum conference and call for posters,

Join leading quantum researchers at the Year of Quantum Across Canada Conference that will highlight advances in quantum information theory and applications. The conference is co-hosted by the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) and Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics from October 6 to 9, 2025.

  • Learn about and share the latest advances in quantum information theory and applications.
  • Find opportunities to collaborate with local, Canadian and international quantum researchers.
  • Celebrate 100 years since the initial development of quantum mechanics this International Year of Quantum.

IQC and Perimeter Institute invite all scientists who are interested in:

  • Quantum metrology
  • Quantum simulation and quantum advantage
  • Quantum error-correction and fault tolerance
  • Quantum complexity and algorithms
  • Quantum communication and networks
  • Quantum cryptography
  • Quantum information in quantum matter and quantum gravity

Register Today

Registration Deadlines: 

  • In-Person: September 22 [2025] at 23:59 ET
  • Virtual: October 6 [2025] at 23:59 ET

We are hosting a poster session on Tuesday, October 7 [2025]. Abstract submission deadline is September 19 [2025] at 23:59 ET.

Please forward this email to your colleagues who would be interested in attending. Questions can be directed to mail to: iqc.events@uwaterloo.ca

I have more information about the call for poster submissions, from the Year of Quantum Across Canada’s Call for Abstracts webpage,

Submission deadline: Sep[t] 19, 2025, 11:59 PM [ET]

The Year of Quantum Across Canada Symposium will be hosting a poster session on Tuesday, Oct 7th [2025] at IQC. Poster submissions are welcome and will be reviewed by the program committee. Some posters may be selected to present as a contributed talk. If you are interested in your poster being considered for a talk, please indicate this on the submission form.

NOTE: You must be in attendance at the Symposium in Waterloo to present a poster and/or contributed talk. We encourage you to register for the Symposium as soon as possible as space is limited. You will be advised if your poster has been accepted before the registration fee payment deadline.

If you have questions about the Call for Abstracts with respect to your research, please contact Alex May (amay@perimeterinstitute.ca).

Any logistical questions about the application process, the website or decision timelines should be directed to conferences@perimeterinstitute.ca

Then, there’s this from the Year of Quantum Across Canada’s Speaker List webpage, Note: Two confirmed speakers from Canada to “celebrate and aim to strengthen the quantum information science community in Canada and beyond, by bringing together leading Canadian researchers as well as members of the broader quantum community” as per the conference homepage. Maybe they’ll get a few more before October 2025?,

Speaker List

Confirmed Speakers:

Christian Bauer (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Alexandre Blais (Université de Sherbrooke)
Sergey Bravyi (IBM Research – Thomas J. Watson Research Center)
Nikolas Breuckmann (University of Bristol)
Soonwon Choi (MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology])
Zohreh Davoudi (University of Maryland)
Matthew Fisher (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Dakshita Khurana (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Aleksander Kubica (Yale University)
Hank Lamm (Fermilab)
Laura Mancinska (University of Copenhagen)
Antonio Mezzacapo (IBM)
John Preskill (Caltech)
Martin Savage (University of Washington)
Brian Swingle (Brandeis University)
Nathan Wiebe (University of Toronto)
Yu-Xiang Yang (The University of Hong Kong)

Moving on, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) took a slightly more celebratory approach to their launch of the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology 2025 (IYQ 2025) in February 2025 (see my January 31, 2025 posting).

You can find the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology 2025 (IYQ 2025) website here. It provides information about a plethora of quantum events in countries around the world along with this video embedded here too,

Happy International Year of Quantum Science and Technology 2025 (YQ 2025)!

Are we and our world a computer simulation?

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There is a fascinating Dec. 10, 2012 news item on Nanowerk about a philosophical question that’s being researched by a team of physicists at the University of Washington (Note: I have removed a link),

The concept that current humanity could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly (“Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?“) by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. In the paper, he argued that at least one of three possibilities is true:

The human species is likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage.

Any posthuman civilization is very unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of its evolutionary history.

We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

He also held that “the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.”

Here’s what the University of Washington physicists, from the Dec. 10, 2012 University of Washington news release by Vincent Stricherz, which originated the news item,

With current limitations and trends in computing, it will be decades before researchers will be able to run even primitive simulations of the universe. But the UW team has suggested tests that can be performed now, or in the near future, that are sensitive to constraints imposed on future simulations by limited resources.

Currently, supercomputers using a technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics and starting from the fundamental physical laws that govern the universe can simulate only a very small portion of the universe, on the scale of one 100-trillionth of a meter, a little larger than the nucleus of an atom, said Martin Savage, a UW physics professor.

…

However, Savage said, there are signatures of resource constraints in present-day simulations that are likely to exist as well in simulations in the distant future, including the imprint of an underlying lattice if one is used to model the space-time continuum.

The supercomputers performing lattice quantum chromodynamics calculations essentially divide space-time into a four-dimensional grid. That allows researchers to examine what is called the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature and the one that binds subatomic particles called quarks and gluons together into neutrons and protons at the core of atoms.

“If you make the simulations big enough, something like our universe should emerge,” Savage said. Then it would be a matter of looking for a “signature” in our universe that has an analog in the current small-scale simulations.

Savage and colleagues Silas Beane of the University of New Hampshire, who collaborated while at the UW’s Institute for Nuclear Theory, and Zohreh Davoudi, a UW physics graduate student, suggest that the signature could show up as a limitation in the energy of cosmic rays.

In a paper they have posted on arXiv, an online archive for preprints of scientific papers in a number of fields, including physics, they say that the highest-energy cosmic rays would not travel along the edges of the lattice in the model but would travel diagonally, and they would not interact equally in all directions as they otherwise would be expected to do.

“This is the first testable signature of such an idea,” Savage said.

If such a concept turned out to be reality, it would raise other possibilities as well. For example, Davoudi suggests that if our universe is a simulation, then those running it could be running other simulations as well, essentially creating other universes parallel to our own.

“Then the question is, ‘Can you communicate with those other universes if they are running on the same platform?’” she said. [emphasis mine]

Here’s the citation for and a link to the arXiv.org paper by Beane, Davoudi, and Savage,

Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation by Silas R. Beane, Zohreh Davoudi, Martin J. Savage (Submitted on 4 Oct 2012 (v1), last revised 9 Nov 2012 (this version, v2))

Fascinating, yes?