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
  
• Quantum LDPC code surgery can perform parallel 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

• In Fall 2024, I helped organize a reading group on Quantum Fault-Tolerance with Rachel Zhang, Adam Wills and Vinod Vaikuntanathan.
• I presented a recent work with IBM 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 also presented this work at QIP 2025.
• 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 gave a guest lecture at UCLA on An Introduction to Quantum LDPC Codes in March 2024, hosted by Professor Jens Palsberg.
• I attended QEC 2023 at Sydney, Australia. Did you know that visitors can pet koalas and (small) kangaroos at the Featherdale Wildlife Park?
• I presented our work with IBM on Quantum Locally Testable Code with Constant Soundness at QIP 2023 in Gent, Belgium. Here are some photos of the beautiful city of Gent. I also presented this work at IBM Yorktown.
• 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 attended 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

1. Extractors: QLDPC Architecture for Efficient Pauli-Based Computation, Mar 2025
   Zhiyang He, Alexander Cowtan, Dominic Williamson, Theodore Yoder. [arxiv]

2. Parallel Logical Measurements via Quantum Code Surgery, Mar 2025
   Alexander Cowtan, Zhiyang He, Dominic Williamson, Theodore Yoder. [arxiv]

3. Quantum Codes with Addressable and Transversal Non-Clifford Gates, Feb 2025 Zhiyang He, Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Adam Wills, Rachel Yun Zhang.
   Talks at MIT and Coogee 2025. [arxiv]

4. Experimental Demonstration of Logical Magic State Distillation, Dec 2024
   QuEra Team and Collaborators.
   [arXiv], [Blog post by QuEra]

5. Permutation gates in the third level of the Clifford hierarchy, Oct 2024
   Zhiyang He, Luke Robitaille, Xinyu Tan.
   Talk at MIT. [arXiv], [Poster at QIP 2025]

6. Improved QLDPC Surgery: Logical Measurements and Bridging Codes, July 2024
   Andrew Cross, Zhiyang He, Patrick Rall, Theodore Yoder.
   QIP 2025. Voted talk at FTQT 2024.
   Talks at MIT, Harvard, IBM, and APS March Meetings.
   [arXiv], [Slides at QIP]

7. Single-shot decoding of good quantum LDPC codes, June 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]

8. Quantum Locally Testable Code with Constant Soundness, Sep 2022
   Andrew Cross, Zhiyang He, Anand Natarajan, Mario Szegedy, Guanyu Zhu.
   QIP 2023. Quantum.
   Talks at MIT, Tufts, and IBM Yorktown.
   [arXiv], [Talk at QIP]
   

Graph Algorithms

1. Breaking the $n^k$ Barrier for Minimum $k$-cut on Simple Graphs, Nov 2021
   Zhiyang He, Jason Li.
   STOC 2022. [arXiv], [Talk at STOC]

2. Near-linear-time, Optimal Vertex Cut Sparsifier in Directed Acyclic Graphs, Nov 2020
   Zhiyang He, Jason Li, Magnus Wahlström.
   European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA) 2021, Best Paper Award. [arXiv]

Combinatorics

1. New Upper Bound on Extremal Number of Even Cycles, Sep 2020
   Zhiyang He.
   The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. [arXiv]

2. Hypergraphs with Few Berge Paths of Fixed Length between Vertices, July 2018
   Zhiyang He, Michael Tait.
   SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics. [arXiv]