What’s New

Topological phases of matter can be protected not only by on-site symmetries, but also by crystalline symmetries. In this talk, I will present the classification of 1D symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases protected by both on-site and crystalline symmetries—referred to as modulated SPT phases—and show how it aligns with the crystalline equivalence principle through the MPS formalism. Furthermore, I will discuss their applications to Lieb–Schultz–Mattis (LSM) constraints and non-invertible symmetries.

We are delighted to announce that Prof. Meng WANG at Sun Yan-sen University has been awarded the prestigious Dan Tsui Fellowship by the Hong Kong Institute of Quantum Science & Technology (HKIQST) at The University of Hong Kong. The fellowship was conferred through a highly selective process conducted by the Selection Panel, comprising Advisory Board Members Prof. FENG Donglai, Prof. Jason HO Tin Lun, Prof. Hoi Kwong LO, and Prof. Xiangang WAN, assisted with HKIQST Executive Members Prof. Zidan WANG, Prof. Wang YAO, Prof. Xiaobo YIN, and Prof. Shizhong ZHANG. Prof. WANG’s groundbreaking realization of superconductivity in nickelates La₃Ni₂O₇ (Nature, 2023) has established a third class of high Tc superconductors, complementing the renowned families of oxide and iron based compounds. This landmark discovery has already stimulated extensive experimental and theoretical investigations, particularly into superconductivity under pressure, and is expected to catalyze further advances in the field. We warmly welcome Prof. WANG to the HKIQST community and look forward to the invaluable insights and contributions his presence will inspire. His fellowship marks not only a personal achievement but also a significant step forward for superconductivity research. Congratulations to Prof. Meng WANG!

Relativistic zero-knowledge proofs (RZKP) exploit the no-superluminal principle between spatially separated provers, offering a use case of phishing-proof identity verification — but prior demonstrations required 60 meters of separation, and soundness against entangled provers remained open. In this paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14324), we address both. From an engineering perspective, we push the entire challenge-response path onto FPGAs and account for latency transceiver-by-transceiver, cutting the round-trip window to 100 ns and halving the required separation to 30 meters. These techniques are protocol-agnostic and transfer to any relativistic protocol. Deploying across two rooms of a working office building, we scale to six million rounds and provide the first phase-by-phase timing decomposition of an RZKP implementation. The bottleneck is not the physics. It is network packet processing during verification — isolated by a single-verifier three-prover variant that eliminates inter-verifier communication. On the theory side, we prove the entangled-soundness bound for a two-prover graph-coloring RZKP, via a modified protocol and a reduction through almost-commuting operator assignments. The bound is real, but loose: |E|⁸ scaling, against the |E|⁴ of the known three-prover result. We identify exactly where each penalty is paid, offering the reduction chain as a reusable template for lifting classical soundness proofs — and a map of its costs.