Álvaro M. Alhambra

So many strong QEC arXiv submissions today that I could guess there was a conference's deadline (turns out its this of course qec-conference.org/2026/ )

Personal reminder not to do API science

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History | Quanta Magazine Researchers in “natural language processing” tried to tame human language. Then came the transformer.

www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt...

There was this term, “API science,’’ that people would use to be like: “We’re doing science on a product? This isn’t science, it’s not reproducible.”

Incredible stuff

Open positions for tenured scientist (Científico titular) www.boe.es/diario_boe/t...
and senior scientist (Investigador científico) www.boe.es/diario_boe/t...
They both include positions in quantum tech 1/

PSA: There are going to be many open positions in quantum technologies in CSIC in the coming years. Permanent positions. If you are interested, please review earlier calls to understand the requirements 1/

Wondering if I should learn what all this "quantum chemistry" is about

The large deviation approach to statistical mechanics The theory of large deviations is concerned with the exponential decay of probabilities of large fluctuations in random systems. These probabilities are important in many fields of study, including st...

Few texts have had a bigger positive impact in my scientific thinking than the first couple of pages of this arxiv.org/abs/0804.0327

Esto debería ser de cárcel

There's no escape 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

The Fribourg Declaration “The papermill crisis is not an external attack on science but a mirror held up to its dysfunctional ecosystem. The for-profit publishing industry, posing as a newly found saviour of research…

I'm curious to know if people have encountered papermills in physics, it seems to be a huge problem (great blog btw) forbetterscience.com/2025/11/17/t...

Fun fact: yesterday I gave an outreach talk and when presenting Shor's algorithm I had 24=6×2×2 as an example of prime factoring

everyone wants to be a DJ, no one wants to dance This is not an essay about nightlife, not exclusively.

This is a fantastic essay and I wonder how much if it directly translates into science (e.g. paper writing as opposed to paper reading these days) danioffline.substack.com/p/everyone-w...

Lets see what hsppens today then haha, I've heard of a couple of papers that should come out

Yep I didnt realise but it will likely be much worse/better (?)

Mostly good I'd say haha

The quant-ph arXiv is on FIRE today 🔥 🔥🔥

A non-physicist friend of mine just today made 10k selling IonQ shares, great times for QC!

Shamelessly stealing this image for every single time I have to explain the Fourier transform in the future

Trying to fit this in my next grant application

Completely abhorred by the correct spelling being "simulatability" and not "simulability".

Liouvillian-gap analysis of open quantum many-body systems in the weak dissipation limit Recent experiments have reported that novel physics emerge in open quantum many-body sys- tems due to an interplay of interactions and dissipation, which stimulate theoretical studies of the many-body...

The most interesting idea I've learnt this week: arxiv.org/abs/2311.10304

In a dissipative setting, if one takes the thermodynamic limit first and then the limit of zero dissipation, you are left with a Liouvillian gap related to the relaxation of the closed system dynamics

One more day, one more chance to pretend that I understand the word "topological"

Rapid Thermalization of Dissipative Many-Body Dynamics of Commuting Hamiltonians - Communications in Mathematical Physics Quantum systems typically reach thermal equilibrium rather quickly when coupled to a thermal environment. The usual way of bounding the speed of this process is by estimating the spectral gap of the d...

I am very happy to announce that my first published article „Rapid Thermalization of Dissipative Many-Body Dynamics of Commuting Hamiltonians“ is now published in Communications in Mathematical Physics.

rdcu.be/euy1Y

I feel honored and humbled to have been accepted in such a prestigious journal.

Oh this looks interesting

If this sounds like I'm a bit annoying as a co-author the answer is yes

I have many opinions on scientific writing and one of them is that we should typically aim to do better than "closing a gap" in the literature

The Complexity of Thermalization in Finite Quantum Systems Thermalization is the process through which a physical system evolves toward a state of thermal equilibrium. Determining whether or not a physical system will thermalize from an initial state has been...

Today's addition to the reading list: arxiv.org/abs/2507.00405 - maybe I'll finally understand PSPACE

A bit overwhelmed by how hard it is to keep track of results I want to learn about

Super interesting read!