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.

Recent Works

• Extractor architectures: A bridge from QLDPC memories to large-scale fault-tolerant QLDPC computers. [Slides], [Talk at QEC]
  Extractors: QLDPC Architecture for Efficient Pauli-Based Computation

  

• Quantum code surgery, but get them for constant time a piece if you run many of them.
  Fast and fault-tolerant logical measurements: Auxiliary hypergraphs and transversal surgery

• Fault-tolerance is, at its core, a combinatorial study.
  Composable Quantum Fault-Tolerance

• Check it out: permutation gates in \(C_3\) whose inverses are not in \(C_k\).
  Characterization of permutation gates in the third level of the Clifford hierarchy

Talks and Travel

• I gave an invited talk on Challenges in Scalable Quantum Error Correction at the Mathematics of Computation and Algorithms Workshop hosted by IBM Cambridge.
• I presented our work on Extractors at the Scalable QEC Workshop, part of IEEE Quantum Week hosted in Albuquerque. We visited their Watermelon Mountains.
• I presented our work on Extractors: QLDPC Architecture for Efficient Pauli-Based Computation (Slides) at Yale’s YQI and QEC 2025. 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 gave a guest lecture at UCLA titled An Introduction to Quantum LDPC Codes, hosted by Professor Jens Palsberg.
• I attended QEC 2023 in Sydney, Australia. Did you know that visitors can pet koalas and (small) kangaroos at the Featherdale Wildlife Park?

Experiences

• I am serving on the program committee of QIP 2026.
• 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.
• At Carnegie Mellon, I taught recitations for Discrete Math, Concepts of Mathematics, and Calculus II.

Writings

Quantum

1. Fast and fault-tolerant logical measurements: Auxiliary hypergraphs and transversal surgery, 2025
   Alexander Cowtan, Zhiyang He, Dominic J. Williamson, Theodore J. Yoder. [arxiv]

2. Layer codes as partially self-correcting quantum memories, 2025
   Shouzhen Gu, Libor Caha, Shin Ho Choe, Zhiyang He, Aleksander Kubica, Eugene Tang.
   Talks at SQuInT 2025, Princeton PCTS and MCQST 2025
   [arxiv], [Alex’s Talk at Princeton], [Libor’s Talk at Munich]

3. Characterization of permutation gates in the 3rd level of the Clifford hierarchy, 2025
   Zhiyang He, Luke Robitaille, Xinyu Tan.
   Talk at MIT. Supersedes an earlier preprint.
   [arxiv], [Poster at QIP & QEC]

4. Composable Quantum Fault-Tolerance, 2025
   Zhiyang He, Quynh T. Nguyen, Christopher A. Pattison.
   QEC 2025.
   [arxiv], [Chris’s Talk at QEC]

5. 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]

6. Extractors: QLDPC Architecture for Efficient Pauli-Based Computation, 2025
   Zhiyang He, Alexander Cowtan, Dominic J. Williamson, Theodore J. Yoder.
   QEC 2025.
   Invited talk at the Scalable QEC Workshop at IEEE Quantum Week (QCE 2025).
   Talks at Simons, MIT, IBM, Yale YQI, Xanadu, DIMACS, and USydney & PsiQuantum.
   [arxiv], [Slides], [Talk at Simons], [Talk at QEC]

7. Parallel Logical Measurements via Quantum Code Surgery, 2025
   Alexander Cowtan, Zhiyang He, Dominic J. Williamson, Theodore J. Yoder.
   QEC 2025, TQC 2025.
   [arxiv], [Alex’s Talk at QEC]

8. (I)  Quantum Codes with Addressable and Transversal Non-Clifford Gates, 2025
   (II) Asymptotically Good 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 I], [arxiv II], [Slides], [Adam’s Talk at APQEC], [Rachel’s Talk at QEC]

9. 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, and 60 more authors: Joseph Campo, Kevin Bagnall, Minho Kwon, Thomas Karolyshyn, Phillip Weinberg, Madelyn Cain, Simon J. Evered, Alexandra A. Geim, Marcin Kalinowski, Sophie H. Li, Tom Manovitz, Jesse Amato-Grill, James I. Basham, Liane Bernstein, Boris Braverman, Alexei Bylinskii, Adam Choukri, Robert DeAngelo, Fang Fang, Connor Fieweger, Paige Frederick, David Haines, Majd Hamdan, Julian Hammett, Ning Hsu, Ming-Guang Hu, Florian Huber, Ningyuan Jia, Dhruv Kedar, Milan Kornjača, Fangli Liu, John Long, Jonathan Lopatin, Pedro L. S. Lopes, Xiu-Zhe Luo, Tommaso Macrì, Ognjen Marković, Luis A. Martínez-Martínez, Xianmei Meng, Stefan Ostermann, Evgeny Ostroumov, David Paquette, Zexuan Qiang, Vadim Shofman, Anshuman Singh, Manuj Singh, Nandan Sinha, Henry Thoreen, Noel Wan, Yiping Wang, Daniel Waxman-Lenz, Tak Wong, Jonathan Wurtz, Andrii Zhdanov, Laurent Zheng, Markus Greiner, Alexander Keesling, Nathan Gemelke, Vladan Vuletić, Takuya Kitagawa, Sheng-Tao Wang, Dolev Bluvstein, Mikhail D. Lukin, Alexander Lukin, Hengyun Zhou, Sergio H. Cantú.
   Nature (2025).
   Invited to the Scalable QEC Workshop at IEEE Quantum Week (QCE 2025).
   Talks at QEC 2025, Princeton PCTS, FTQC, MIT, Harvard, APS March Meetings.
   [arxiv], [Nature], [Harry’s talk at Princeton], [Harry’s Talk at QEC], [Popular Mechanics]
   

10. 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.
    [arxiv], [Slides at QIP], [Talk at QIP with Esha], [Poster at QEC]

11. 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], [Slides at TQC], [Talk at TQC], [CMP]

12. 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

1. Breaking the \(n^k\) Barrier for Minimum \(k\)-cut on Simple Graphs, 2021
   Zhiyang He, Jason Li.
   STOC 2022. [arxiv], [Talk at STOC], [STOC]

2. 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]

Combinatorics

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

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

Others

• Master’s Thesis: On Extremal Combinatorics and Its Applications in Matroid Theory