Hi! This is Sunny, I am a graduate student at MIT advised by Professor Peter Shor and Anand Natarajan. My research is in quantum computation, with a focus in quantum error correction. I believe quantum computational power is a fundamental new resource bestowed to us by nature, and quantum error correction is the procedure that refines this raw resource for use in applications. I hope my work contributes to the constructions and later improvements of truly fault-tolerant, large-scale quantum computers in not-too-many decades.
Prior to grad school I was an undergrad at CMU. I worked in graph algorithms with Professor Anupam Gupta and Jason Li, and combinatorics with Professor Boris Bukh and Michael Tait.
New preprints
A highly flexible, optimizable and scalable architecture for fault-tolerant quantum computers based on QLDPC codes, powered by a new primitive called extractor which can augment any QLDPC memory into a computational block.
Extractors: QLDPC Architecture for Efficient Pauli-Based Computation
- ML decoders can be faster and more accurate than BPOSD for QLDPC codes.
Machine Learning Decoding of Circuit-Level Noise for Bivariate Bicycle Codes - Quantum LDPC code surgery can perform parallel logical Pauli measurements.
Parallel Logical Measurements via Quantum Code Surgery - Punctured quantum Reed-Solomon codes have transversal and addressable CCZ gates. Quantum Codes with Addressable and Transversal Non-Clifford Gates
Magic state distillation works!
Experimental Demonstration of Logical Magic State Distillation
Talks and Travel
- I will present our work on Extractors at the Quantum Algorithms, Complexity, and Fault Tolerance Reunion hosted by Simons Institute.
- I presented our work on Quantum Codes with Addressable and Transversal Non-Clifford Gates (Slides) at Inria’s QASAR Seminar.
- I presented our work on Extractors: QLDPC Architecture for Efficient Pauli-Based Computation (Slides) at Yale’s YQI. Here are a few photos taken at Yale, whose rare book library holds a signed copy of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
- I presented our work on Improved QLDPC Surgery: Logical Measurements and Bridging Codes at the Fault-Tolerant Quantum Technologies Workshop at Benasque, Spain. Here are a few photos of the mountain town of Benasque.
- I presented our work on Single-shot decoding of good quantum LDPC codes at TQC 2024 hosted in Okinawa, Japan. Here are some photos of Japan.
- I attended QEC 2023 in Sydney, Australia. Did you know that visitors can pet koalas and (small) kangaroos at the Featherdale Wildlife Park?
- I presented our work on Quantum Locally Testable Code with Constant Soundness at QIP 2023 in Gent, Belgium. Here are some photos of the beautiful city of Gent.
Past Updates
- I gave an invited talk on Extractors at the DIMACS Workshop on Quantum Software Systems and Theory, hosted at Rutgers University.
- I gave a talk on Building a Quantum Computer Beyond the Surface Code in Apr 2025, at the MIT PQI seminar organized by Anand Natarajan.
- In Fall 2024, I helped organize a reading group on Quantum Fault-Tolerance with Rachel Zhang, Adam Wills and Vinod Vaikuntanathan.
- I gave a guest lecture at UCLA titled An Introduction to Quantum LDPC Codes in March 2024, hosted by Professor Jens Palsberg.
- In Summer 2023, I attended the Quantum Summer Cluster Workshop at Simons Institute.
- In Spring 2022, I helped organize a reading group on Asymptotically Good QLDPC Codes with Eugene Tang and Anand Natarajan.
Experiences
- I was a summer intern at QuEra in 2024.
- In Spring 2024, I was a visitor at the Quantum Algorithms, Complexity, and Fault Tolerance Workshop hosted by Simons Institute at UC Berkeley.
- I was a summer intern at IBM Quantum in 2022 and 2023.
- In Fall 2022, I was a TA for Peter Shor’s course on Quantum Computation.
Publications
Quantum
Composable Quantum Fault-Tolerance, To Appear
Zhiyang He, Quynh Nguyen, Christopher Pattison.
QEC 2025.Machine Learning Decoding of Circuit-Level Noise for Bivariate Bicycle Codes, 2025
John Blue, Harshil Avlani, Zhiyang He, Liu Ziyin, Issac Chuang.
[arxiv], [Poster at QIP]Extractors: QLDPC Architecture for Efficient Pauli-Based Computation, 2025
Zhiyang He, Alexander Cowtan, Dominic J. Williamson, Theodore J. Yoder.
QEC 2025.
Talk at Quantum Algorithms, Complexity, and Fault Tolerance Reunion at Simons Institute.
Talks at MIT, Yale YQI, FTQC, Xanadu, DIMACS, and U. Sydney & PsiQuantum.
[arxiv], [Slides]Parallel Logical Measurements via Quantum Code Surgery, 2025
Alexander Cowtan, Zhiyang He, Dominic J. Williamson, Theodore J. Yoder.
QEC 2025, TQC 2025.
Talk at FTQC. [arxiv]Quantum Codes with Addressable and Transversal Non-Clifford Gates, 2025
Zhiyang He, Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Adam Wills, Rachel Yun Zhang.
QEC 2025.
Talks at MIT, Coogee 2025, Asia Pacific QEC, and Inria.
[arxiv], [Adam’s Talk at APQEC], [Slides at Inria]Experimental Demonstration of Logical Magic State Distillation, 2024
Pedro Sales Rodriguez, John M. Robinson, Paul Niklas Jepsen, Zhiyang He, Casey Duckering, Chen Zhao, Kai-Hsin Wu, , Sheng-Tao Wang, Dolev Bluvstein, Mikhail D. Lukin, Alexander Lukin, Hengyun Zhou, Sergio H. Cantú.
Talks at MIT, Harvard, APS March Meetings, and FTQC.
[arxiv], [Blog Post by QuEra]Permutation gates in the third level of the Clifford hierarchy, 2024
Zhiyang He, Luke Robitaille, Xinyu Tan.
Talk at MIT. [arxiv], [Poster at QIP & QEC]Improved QLDPC Surgery: Logical Measurements and Bridging Codes, 2024
Andrew Cross, Zhiyang He, Patrick J. Rall, Theodore J. Yoder.
QIP 2025.
Talk at Fault-Tolerant Quantum Technologies in Benasque.
Talks at MIT, Harvard, IBM, APS March Meetings, and FTQC.
[arxiv], [Slides at QIP]Single-shot decoding of good quantum LDPC codes, 2023
Shouzhen Gu, Eugene Tang, Libor Caha, Shin Ho Choe, Zhiyang He, Aleksander Kubica.
QEC 2023, TQC 2024. Communications in Mathematical Physics.
Talk at Advances in Quantum Coding Theory at Simons Institute.
[arxiv], [Shouzhen’s Talk at Simons], [Talk at TQC], [Slides at TQC], [CMP]Quantum Locally Testable Code with Constant Soundness, 2022
Andrew Cross, Zhiyang He, Anand Natarajan, Mario Szegedy, Guanyu Zhu.
QIP 2023. Quantum.
Talks at MIT, Tufts, APS March Meetings, and IBM Yorktown.
[arxiv], [Talk at QIP], [Quantum]
Graph Algorithms
Breaking the \(n^k\) Barrier for Minimum \(k\)-cut on Simple Graphs, 2021
Zhiyang He, Jason Li.
STOC 2022. [arxiv], [Talk at STOC], [STOC]Near-linear-time, Optimal Vertex Cut Sparsifier in Directed Acyclic Graphs, 2020
Zhiyang He, Jason Li, Magnus Wahlström.
European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA) 2021, Best Paper Award. [arxiv], [ESA]