School of Physical Sciences

In the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, quantum error mitigation (QEM) is essential for producing reliable outputs from quantum circuits. We present a statistical signal processing approach to QEM that estimates the most likely noiseless outputs from noisy quantum measurements. Our model assumes that circuit depth is sufficient for depolarizing noise, producing corrupted observations that resemble a uniform distribution alongside classical bit-flip errors from readout. Our method consists of two steps: a filtering stage that discards uninformative depolarizing noise and an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm that computes a maximum likelihood (ML) estimate over the remaining data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on small-qubit systems using circuit simulations in Qiskit and IBM quantum processing unit (QPU) data, and compare its performance to contemporary statistical QEM techniques. We also show that our method scales to larger qubit counts using synthetically generated data consistent with our noise model. These results suggest that principled statistical methods can offer scalable and interpretable solutions for quantum error mitigation in realistic NISQ settings. Finally, while this talk solves a problem that appears on quantum computers, the solution technique does not require a quantum background. People who work in information theory, signal processing, and machine learning should be able to follow and appreciate the topic.

• Speaker: Prof. Dror Baron, North Carolina State University
• Wednesday 15 October 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Venue: MR5, CMS Pavilion A.
• Series: Information Theory Seminar; organiser: Prof. Ramji Venkataramanan.

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TGM150 - 9th Edwards Symposium – Frontiers in Statistical Physics and Soft Matter

• Speaker: Eric Vanden-Eijnden (Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences)
• Wednesday 10 September 2025, 16:10-16:50
• Venue: External.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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Abstract not available

Note: This talk will unusually take place on a Monday.

• Speaker: Mehtaab Sawhney (Columbia University)
• Tuesday 11 November 2025, 14:00-15:30
• Venue: MR4, CMS.
• Series: Discrete Analysis Seminar; organiser: Julia Wolf.

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In this talk, I will present a hybrid individual cell-based mathematical and computational model, incorporating single-cell based intracellular dynamics, the cell microenvironment and cell-cell interactions to study the growth and progression of cancer cell mass. Multiscale mathematical models incorporating such complex interactions can help in studying cancer progression and serve as an in-silico test base for comparing and optimising various multi-modality anticancer treatment protocols such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy. We will then discuss how this framework can be used to understand various anticancer treatment outcomes.  

OOEW07 - Mathematical Foundations of Oncological Digital Twins

• Speaker: Gibin Powathil (Swansea University)
• Thursday 18 September 2025, 11:50-12:10
• Venue: Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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Cancer is a complex systemic disease driven by genetic and epigenetic aberrations that impact a multitude of signalling pathways operating in different cell types. The dynamic and evolving nature of the disease leads to tumour heterogeneity and treatment resistance, posing significant challenges for designing effective therapeutic strategies. Digital twins of cancer tumours are emerging as a transformative tool in oncology to enable a more personalised, adaptive approach to treatment. In this talk, I will present a growing library of mechanistic, data-driven computational models that capture key signalling pathways within tumour cells and their microenvironment across several cancer types, including triple-negative breast cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, melanoma and glioblastoma. These interpretable models allow us to uncover and anticipate emergent resistance mechanisms, and to design patient-specific treatment strategies that counteract the forces of clonal selection driving treatment relapse. By integrating mechanistic insights with clinical data, we aim to optimise therapeutic interventions for patients with hard-to-treat cancers and advance the clinical utility of digital twins in precision oncology.

OOEW07 - Mathematical Foundations of Oncological Digital Twins

• Speaker: Jasmin Fisher (University College London)
• Thursday 18 September 2025, 13:30-14:15
• Venue: Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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Please note that this seminar will be held in the Department of Engineering

In the past two decades, researchers in information theory have obtained very fruitful results in the study of the Shannon entropy. This study has led to the discovery of a new class of constraints on the Shannon entropy, called non-Shannon-type inequalities. Intimate connections between the Shannon entropy and different branches of mathematics including finite group theory, combinatorics, Kolmogorov complexity, probability, matrix theory, etc, have been established. All these discoveries are based on a geometrical interpretation of constraints on the entropy function. We assert that the same formality can be applied to the study of inequalities in other branches of mathematics. To illustrate the idea, we revisit with this formality a few celebrated inequalities: the AM-GM inequality, the Markov inequality, and the Cauchy-Scharwz inequality. Applications of this formality has the potential of leading to the discovery of new inequalities in different branches of mathematics.

Bio: Raymond W. Yeung is a Choh-Ming Li Professor of Information Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He received his B.S., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University in Electrical Engineering in 1984, 1985, and 1988, respectively. Before joining CUHK in 1991, he was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He has been serving as Co-Director of the Institute of Network Coding at CUHK since 2010. He is the author of the books A First Course in Information Theory (Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2002) and Information Theory and Network Coding (Springer 2008), which have been adopted by over 100 institutions around the world. In spring 2014, he gave the first MOOC in the world on information theory that reached over 60,000 students to date.

He is a recipient of the 2005 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2007, the 2016 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award, the 2018 ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Paper Award, the 2021 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, and the 2022 Claude E. Shannon Award. In 2015, he was named an Outstanding Overseas Chinese Information Theorist by the China Information Theory Society. He is a Fellow of the IEEE , Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences, Hong Kong Institution of Engineers, and the US National Academy of Inventors.

• Speaker: Prof. Raymond W. Yeung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Friday 19 September 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Venue: James Dyson Building Seminar Room, Department of Engineering.
• Series: Information Theory Seminar; organiser: Prof. Ramji Venkataramanan.

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Tumors are a mixture of malignant cancer cells, stromal cells, and immune cells that interact as dynamically evolving ecosystems. Over the last ten years, there has been substantial progress in building patient-tailored simulation models of cancer: a key component of digital twins. In the context of cancer immunology, single-cell effects and pairwise cell-cell interactions are paramount. Agent-based models (ABMs), which simulate individual cells as software agents that interact in simulated tissue environments, are well-suited to simulating these cancer-immune systems, but they generally require substantial hand-coding (in C++, Python, etc.). Beyond creating a substantial barrier to entry for domain experts and multidisciplinary teams, this has also hampered model reuse, extensibility, maintenance, and reproducibility. In this talk, we present a new conceptual framework—a cell behavior hypothesis grammar—that uses natural language statements (cell rules) to create mathematical and simulation models in real time without writing code. This enables systematic integration of biological knowledge and multi-omics data to generate in silico models with user-friendly online tools, enabling virtual “thought experiments” that interactively test and expand our understanding of multicellular systems and generate new testable hypotheses. We demonstrate its use in developing both de novo mechanistic models and those informed (and initialized) by multi-omics data, with focused examples on models of hypoxic breast cancer, tumor-immune interactions, and virtual combination immunotherapy trials in pancreatic ductal carcinoma (PDAC). We also show how rapid model creation (via the grammar) can be combined with high-performance computing (HPC) to accelerate discovery in cancer biology and development of reusable components for digital twins. We close with a discussion of how language-focused modeling will open new doors to combine human and machine intelligence in mathematical oncology.  These results—recently published in Cell—is the joint work of a broad coalition including Elana Fertig (University of Maryland); Laura Heiser, Young Hwan Chang, Lisa Coussens, and Joe Gray (Oregon Health and Sciences University), Genevieve Stein-O’Brien (Johns Hopkins), and others with my lab at Indiana University. 

OOEW07 - Mathematical Foundations of Oncological Digital Twins

• Speaker: Paul Macklin (Indiana University Bloomington)
• Thursday 18 September 2025, 14:15-15:00
• Venue: Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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We consider d-dimensional Euclidean CFTs on a cylinder perturbed by a relevant or marginal operator. We discuss perturbation theory series for the components of the perturbed theory vacuum and show that they have a new kind of divergences  that appear when the dimension of the perturbing operator exceeds the threshold value of (d+1)/2. If left unrenormalised these divergences make  the overlap of the perturbed and unperturbed theory vacua vanish that is known in the literature as the orthogonality catastrophe. We discuss renormalisation of the vacuum vector in terms of the interface between the perturbed and unperturbed theories and possible implications for truncated Hamiltonian techniques. A number of explicit examples will be  discussed as well as some old results  which are usually linked to Haag’s theorem in infinite volume.

BID - Quantum field theory with boundaries, impurities, and defects

• Speaker: Anatoly Konechny (Heriot-Watt University)
• Tuesday 16 September 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Venue: Seminar Room 2, Newton Institute.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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TGM151 - UK Graduate Modelling Camp 2025

• Speaker: Ann Smith (University of Huddersfield)
• Monday 22 September 2025, 16:35-17:00
• Venue: Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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BID - Quantum field theory with boundaries, impurities, and defects

• Speaker: Anatoly Konechny (Heriot-Watt University)
• Tuesday 16 September 2025, 14:00-15:00
• Venue: Seminar Room 2, Newton Institute.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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Classical gravity in (3+1)-dimensional asymptotically flat spacetimes (AFS) admits an infinite-dimensional symmetry algebra. This algebra is generated by modes of equal-helicity gravitons transforming in integer highest-weight representations of the Lorentz group and can be related to a w-infinity algebra appearing in 2-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT). I will review these ideas which are central in the quest to formulate a holographic correspondence in asymptotically flat spacetimes. The main goal of the talk will be to explain how these structures appear in a flat-space (or Carrollian) limit of 3d CFTs dual to gravity in 4d AdS. 

BID - Quantum field theory with boundaries, impurities, and defects

• Speaker: Ana-Maria Raclariu (King's College London)
• Wednesday 17 September 2025, 10:00-11:30
• Venue: Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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Active gel theory offers elegant, minimal models for active matter systems built from symmetry and conservation principles. Yet, biology rarely cooperates with our theoretical ideals. Using the actomyosin dynamics of the zebrafish embryo as a case study, a system that undergoes partial division in contrast to traditional complete cytokinesis models, I will demonstrate how systematic, biologically-motivated extensions to the canonical active gel models reveal the hidden complexity of cytoskeletal systems. While simple isotropic contractility fails to explain the observed density and velocity profiles, incorporating nematic contractility and nematic order stabilization predicts the formation of contractile actin cables and mechanically-uncoupled depletion zones observed experimentally. We then distill these insights from the mesoscale into a higher-level abstraction by treating the cable and cortex as coupled mechanical components, which yields remarkably accurate predictions of embryo shape deformations. Overall, the hierarchical modelling approach captures the essential physics of the zebrafish cleavage, illustrating an example of turning active matter theories into tractable frameworks for biology. 

TGM150 - 9th Edwards Symposium – Frontiers in Statistical Physics and Soft Matter

• Speaker: Yuting Irene Li (Institute of Science and Technology (IST Austria))
• Friday 12 September 2025, 10:35-11:15
• Venue: External.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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Active solids consume energy to allow for actuation and shape change not possible in equilibrium. We discover a striking anomaly in the continuum description of non-reciprocal active solids, a ubiquitous class of active materials. We find that as microscopic activity increases, macroscale active response can vanish: more is less. Our results unveil a counterintuitive facet of active matter, offering new principles for engineering materials far from equilibrium. 

TGM150 - 9th Edwards Symposium – Frontiers in Statistical Physics and Soft Matter

• Speaker: Anton Souslov (University of Cambridge)
• Thursday 11 September 2025, 09:55-10:35
• Venue: External.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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Learning is a complex dynamical process shaped by many interconnected decisions. Protocols that govern how to tune hyperparameters in artificial networks, or how to allocate cognitive effort in biological learners, can have dramatic effects on performance. Yet our theoretical understanding of optimal learning strategies remains limited, due to the nonlinear nature of learning dynamics and the high dimensionality of the learning space.  In this talk, I will present a framework that combines statistical physics and control theory to identify optimal learning protocols in prototypical neural network models (see Refs. [1,2]). In the high-dimensional limit, we derive closed-form equations for a small set of order parameters that track stochastic gradient descent. This reduction allows to formulate the design of learning protocols—such as curricula, dropout schedules, or noise levels—as an optimal control problem on the dynamics of the order parameters, with the objective of minimizing the final generalization error.  I will discuss applications to both toy models and real datasets, showing how the resulting strategies unveil key learning tradeoffs, for example, between exploiting informative directions in the data and limiting noise sensitivity, and how these insights may contribute to a principled theory of meta-learning.  [1] Mignacco, F. and Mori, F., 2025. A statistical physics framework for optimal learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.07907.  [2] Mori, F., Mannelli, S.S. and Mignacco, F., Optimal Protocols for Continual Learning via Statistical Physics and Control Theory. In The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations. 

TGM150 - 9th Edwards Symposium – Frontiers in Statistical Physics and Soft Matter

• Speaker: Francesca Mignacco (Princeton University)
• Wednesday 10 September 2025, 15:30-16:10
• Venue: External.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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TGM151 - UK Graduate Modelling Camp 2025

• Speaker:
• Friday 26 September 2025, 11:55-12:30
• Venue: Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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TGM151 - UK Graduate Modelling Camp 2025

• Speaker:
• Friday 26 September 2025, 11:25-11:30
• Venue: Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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TGM151 - UK Graduate Modelling Camp 2025

• Speaker:
• Friday 26 September 2025, 11:25-11:55
• Venue: Foyer.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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TGM151 - UK Graduate Modelling Camp 2025

• Speaker:
• Friday 26 September 2025, 11:00-11:25
• Venue: Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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TGM151 - UK Graduate Modelling Camp 2025

• Speaker:
• Friday 26 September 2025, 10:35-11:00
• Venue: Seminar Room 1, Newton Institute.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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TGM151 - UK Graduate Modelling Camp 2025

• Speaker:
• Friday 26 September 2025, 10:15-10:35
• Venue: Foyer.
• Series: Isaac Newton Institute Seminar Series; organiser: nobody.

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