The Simons Observatory (SO) is a new cosmic microwave background experiment being built on Cerro Toco in Chile, due to begin observations in the early 2020s. We describe the scientific goals of the experiment, motivate the design, and forecast its performance. SO will measure the temperature and polarization anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background in six frequency bands centered at: 27, 39, 93, 145, 225 and 280 GHz. The initial configuration of SO will have three small-aperture 0.5-m telescopes and one large-aperture 6-m telescope, with a total of 60,000 cryogenic bolometers. Our key science goals are to characterize the primordial perturbations, measure the number of relativistic species and the mass of neutrinos, test for deviations from a cosmological constant, improve our understanding of galaxy evolution, and constrain the duration of reionization. The small aperture telescopes will target the largest angular scales observable from Chile, mapping ≈ 10% of the sky to a white noise level of 2 µK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, to measure the primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, at a target level of σ(r) = 0.003. The large aperture telescope will map ≈ 40% of the sky at arcminute angular resolution to an expected white noise level of 6 µK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, overlapping with the majority of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope sky region and partially with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. With up to an order of magnitude lower polarization noise than maps from the Planck satellite, the high-resolution sky maps will constrain cosmological parameters derived from the damping tail, gravitational lensing of the microwave background, the primordial bispectrum, and the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects, and will aid in delensing the large-angle polarization signal to measure the tensorto-scalar ratio. The survey will also provide a legacy catalog of 16,000 galaxy clusters and more than 20,000 extragalactic sources a .

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Black holes are found to exist in gravitational theories with the presence of quadratic curvature terms and behave differently from the Schwarzschild solution. We present an exhaustive analysis for determining the quasinormal modes of a test scalar field propagating in a new class of black hole backgrounds in the case of pure EinsteinWeyl gravity. Our result shows that the field decay of quasinormal modes in such a nonSchwarzschild black hole behaves similarly to the Schwarzschild one, but the decay slope becomes much smoother due to the appearance of the Weyl tensor square in the background theory. We also analyze the frequencies of the quasinormal modes in order to characterize the properties of new back holes, and thus, if these modes can be the source of gravitational waves, the underlying theories may be testable in future gravitational wave experiments. We briefly comment on the issue of quantum (in)stability in this theory at linear order.

Distributed quantum computing (DQC) is a promising approach to extending the computational power of near-term quantum devices. However, the non-local quantum communication between quantum devices is much more expensive and error-prone than the local quantum communication within each quantum device. Previous work on the DQC communication optimization focus on optimizing the communication protocol for each individual non-local gate and then adopt quantum compilation designs which are designed for local multi-qubit gates (such as controlled-x or CX gates) in a single quantum computer. The communication patterns in distributed quantum programs are not yet well studied, leading to a far-from-optimal communication cost. In this paper, we identify burst communication, a specific qubit-node communication pattern that widely exists in many distributed programs and can be leveraged to guide communication overhead optimization. We then propose AutoComm, an automatic compiler framework to first extract the burst communication patterns from the input programs, and then optimize the communication steps of burst communication discovered. Experimental results show that our proposed AutoComm can reduce the communication resource consumption and the program latency by 75.6% and 71.4% on average, respectively.