Distinguished Seminar Series Sponsored by the Texas Quantum Institute (TQI) with Vir Bulchanda
Nov
11
2026
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Vir Bulchanda
Nov
11
2026
-
Vir Bulchanda
Description
If I hand you a lump of quantum matter, which quantum information processing tasks is it good for? Addressing this fundamental question requires notions of quantumness that have a simple and practical operational meaning. One such notion is “quantum contextuality”, which reflects the utility of quantum states for achieving better-than-classical performance at nonlocal games. Although they have been widely studied in quantum computer science, most nonlocal games do not exhibit the type of scaling that is relevant to quantum many-body systems, with the notable exception of Mermin’s 1990 construction of the “parity game” for n-qubit GHZ states. I will present a generalization of Mermin’s nonlocal game to arbitrary many-body stabilizer states, together with a quantitative characterization of the resulting quantum-classical separations from classical coding theory and statistical mechanics. A striking corollary of our analysis is that detecting quantum contextuality in genuinely many-body regimes is feasible on current quantum devices. I will discuss connections between this result and recent experiments on quantum computers, which demonstrated quantum advantage for the parity game using GHZ states of up to 71 qubits.
About the Speakers
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Vir Bulchanda
Vir B. Bulchandani read mathematics at the University of Cambridge before receiving a PhD in physics from UC Berkeley in 2020, where his thesis won the Jackson C. Koo Award ...
Vir B. Bulchandani read mathematics at the University of Cambridge before receiving a PhD in physics from UC Berkeley in 2020, where his thesis won the Jackson C. Koo Award in Condensed Matter. After that, he was awarded a three-year PCTS Fellowship by Princeton University to pursue independent research in theoretical physics. He joined the faculty at Rice University in 2024, amid stints at Leibniz Universität Hannover and the National University of Singapore.
Location
EER 3.640
Contact Kamela Syed with any questions or for Zoom information at kamela.syed@austin.utexas.edu