Field notes from the quantum-classical boundary

Should we Leapfrog the Terrestrial Data Center Build-out?

I've been using agents pretty heavily for coding and building, I tried to estimate my usage, I think on average I'm using about 100 W of AI (a typical chat user would be more like less than 0.1 W constant draw). This is calculated from

AI Will Eat Simulation Software (and this may be bad.)

My lab runs on simulation software. COMSOL for finite element modeling. Lumerical and Tidy3D for photonic FDTD. Sonnet and sometimes Palace for microwave circuits. We design quantum devices — mechanical resonators, superconducting circuits, photonic waveguides — and before anything gets fabricated, it gets simulated. "An hour of COMSOL can save a

Hackweek 2026: What happens when a physics lab stops research for ~two weeks

Research labs are exciting environments where we learn, discover and invent new things. But they can be weird as well. You can have someone who fabricates superconducting qubits or photonic circuits and builds systems that operate at the limits allowed by the laws of physics, but who has never written

Quantum Sensing Like a Bird

A few nights ago I was on a panel on Quantum Sensing for Defense. Preparing for this panel crystallized some ideas for me, which I think I should write down somewhere. So here it is! When we talk about "quantum sensing," we often imagine a single, exquisite, hyper-

Les Houches lecture notes

Spending a few days at Les Houches workshop on TFLN photonics 😄 Here are my lecture notes. These are currently a very rough draft, though fairly respectable looking... I used Gemini 2.5 pretty heavily to help prepare these notes. For example, I'd write up some notes on paper,

Fidelity, Fisher Information, QCRB and All that [pt. 1]

What about those time-energy and number-phase uncertainty relations? The way the time-energy uncertainty was often explained to me when I first learned quantum mechanics felt pretty hand-wavy ... The QCRB solves this and puts these uncertainty relations on a proper footing.

Free Energy for Computer Scientists

If nature only cared about minimizing energy, all the gas molecules around us would collapse to the floor and we would suffocate. If nature only maximized entropy, all the gas would expand and disperse throughout the universe, and we would suffocate.

Posting Course Notes on Quantum Hardware

I am going to finally start putting my lecture notes online 😄 For now, I'm beginning with the course notes for AP203/228, which is a two-quarter series: * First quarter: Primarily focused on quantum optics and atomic physics (taught collaboratively with Ben Lev, Monika Schleier-Smith, and Jon

Why start?

A conversation with Wentao.