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Must-Read Quantum Papers from QIP 2025

The 2025 Quantum Information Processing conference (QIP) delivered both breakthroughs and refined understandings across the field. For those who couldn’t attend (or wade through all 200+ preprints), here are the papers that genuinely moved the needle this year.

Foundational Advances

1. "Fault-Tolerant Thresholds Beyond 1% with Concatenated Cat Qubits" (Quantinuum/TU Delft)
2. Experimental validation of logical qubit performance crossing the elusive 1% error threshold using stacked cat qubits. The first hardware demonstration where error correction actually outperforms physical qubits.
3. "A Polynomial-Time Classical Algorithm for Noisy Random Circuit Sampling" (Caltech/UT Austin)
4. A sobering counterpoint to quantum supremacy claims, showing that clever tensor network methods can still challenge near-term devices.

Algorithms & Complexity

1. "Practical Speedups for Quantum Linear Algebra via Spectral Gap Amplification" (MIT/QuEra)
2. Not just a theoretical improvement—this paper shows real-world benchmarks for solving sparse systems on neutral-atom hardware.
3. "Dequantizing Quantum Machine Learning: When Does Quantum Actually Help?" (IBM/Waterloo)
4. A rigorous framework for identifying which quantum ML claims hold water, and which are just hype.

Hardware Innovations

1. "High-Fidelity Two-Qubit Gates in 28Si/SiGe at 1 Kelvin" (Intel/Princeton)
2. Silicon spin qubits finally matching superconducting gate fidelities, but at vastly higher temperatures. Could reshape the scalability debate.
3. "Error-Detected Photonic CNOT Gates with >99.9% Fidelity" (Xanadu/NIST)
4. The missing piece for all-photonic quantum computing—now with fault-tolerant building blocks.

Emerging Directions

1. "Topological Qubits in Twisted Bilayer Graphene" (Microsoft/Copenhagen)
2. First experimental signatures of non-Abelian anyons in a 2D material. Early days, but potentially huge.
3. "Quantum Advantage for Protein Folding Using Hybrid Tensor Networks" (Alphabet DeepMind/UC Berkeley)
4. Not pure QC, but a compelling example of quantum-classical synergy solving real biophysics problems.