Xinyu (Norah) Tan

PhD student, MIT Mathematics

My name is Xinyu Tan (谭欣雨) and I also go by Norah. I am a fourth-year PhD student at MIT Mathematics, advised by Peter Shor and Aram Harrow.

I'm broadly interested in the theory of quantum information and quantum computation. I'm currently most excited about quantum algorithms for simulating and understanding physical systems, though I'm always drawn back to quantum error correction when an interesting problem comes up.

Before MIT, I graduated from Duke in 2022 with highest distinctions in both Mathematics and Computer Science, where I was fortunate to be advised by Robert Calderbank and Jianfeng Lu.

Email: norahtan (at) mit (dot) edu
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Experience

Summer 2026Student Researcher at Google Quantum AI in Los Angeles, hosted by Robin Kothari.
Summer 2025Student Researcher at Google Quantum AI in Los Angeles, hosted by Bill Huggins.
Spring 2024Visiting graduate student, Quantum Algorithms, Complexity, and Fault-Tolerance Program, Simons Institute, UC Berkeley.
Summer 2023Graduate Teaching Assistant for Nicolas Delfosse’s Quantum LDPC codes minicourse at the IAS PCMI summer school.
Summer 2022Research intern at Alibaba Quantum Group, Seattle.
Fall 2020Co-founded the Duke Undergraduate Quantum Information Society (DuQIS) with Catherine Liang.

Publications

Authors are listed in alphabetical order. Exceptions are noted explicitly.

Haar random codes attain the quantum Hamming bound, approximately

Fermi Ma, Xinyu Tan, John Wright

QIP 2026

arXiv slides

Unitary synthesis with fewer T gates

Xinyu Tan

TQC 2026

arXiv

Characterization of permutation gates in the third level of the Clifford hierarchy

Zhiyang He, Luke Robitaille, Xinyu Tan

TQC 2026

arXiv

Beating full state tomography for unentangled spectrum estimation

Angelos Pelecanos, Xinyu Tan, Ewin Tang, John Wright

SODA 2026

arXiv SODA slides

Incompressibility and spectral gaps of random circuits

Chi-Fang Chen, Jeongwan Haah, Jonas Haferkamp, Yunchao Liu, Tony Metger, Xinyu Tan

QIP 2025, short plenary talk

FOCS 2025

arXiv FOCS slides

Efficient approximate unitary designs from random Pauli rotations

Jeongwan Haah, Yunchao Liu, Xinyu Tan

Communications in Mathematical Physics (2025)

FOCS 2024

QIP 2025

arXiv FOCS CMP MIT QI seminar QIP slides

Scalable surface-code decoders with parallelization in time

Xinyu Tan*, Fang Zhang*, Rui Chao, Yaoyun Shi, Jianxin Chen (ordered by contribution; *equal contribution)

PRX Quantum (2023)

QEC 2023, invited talk

Simons Institute Workshop on Advances in Quantum Coding Theory (2024)

arXiv PRX Quantum talk at Simons

Approximate unitary 3-designs from transvection Markov chains

Xinyu Tan, Narayanan Rengaswamy, Robert Calderbank (ordered by contribution)

Designs, Codes and Cryptography (2022)

arXiv DCC

Power spectra of constrained codes with level-based signaling: overcoming finite-length challenges

Jessica Centers*, Xinyu Tan*, Ahmed Hareedy, Robert Calderbank (ordered by contribution; *equal contribution)

IEEE Transactions on Communications (2021)

12th Non-Volatile Memories Workshop (NVMW 2021), Memorable Paper Award Finalist in the ECC and Devices category

arXiv TCOM talk at NVMW