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SUMMARY:The physics of decision: how competitive systems compute\, route\,
  and remember - Natalia Berloff (DAMTP)
DTSTART:20260506T151500Z
DTEND:20260506T161500Z
UID:TALK246112@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Andrea Pizzi
DESCRIPTION:When a physical system resolves a competition  (a laser select
 ing a mode\, a condensate occupying a spin state\, an array of Rydberg ato
 ms relaxing under blockade) the winning state carries a high-dimensional s
 ignature far richer than the winner's identity. These signatures are routi
 nely discarded. I will argue that they should not be. I will survey three 
 families of physical selectors: spatial photonic Ising machines\, polarito
 n condensate networks\, and polychronous wave computers\, showing how driv
 en-dissipative competition naturally implements winner-take-all routing. T
 hese systems share a structural pattern: competition produces both a discr
 ete outcome and a continuous post-selection state. Attractor-keyed memory 
 (AKM) formalises this observation. If the post-selection signatures are re
 peatable and linearly independent across routes\, a single linear decoder 
 compiled from calibration data maps them to arbitrary payloads\, merging s
 election and memory access into one physical event. A single SVD certifies
  capability for any downstream task before it is chosen\, and runtime erro
 r separates into two independently diagnosable channels with distinct phys
 ical remedies. I present the first hardware AKM test: a five-atom Rydberg 
 cell on QuEra's Aquila processor\, where blockade-mediated competition sel
 ects a route and van der Waals interactions write a route-conditioned exci
 tation fingerprint onto neighbouring atoms. The fingerprints survive on ha
 rdware\, and a regularised decoder retrieves payloads below the route-blin
 d baseline. The broader message is a design principle: physical selectors 
 should be engineered not only to choose a winner\, but to emit decodable p
 ost-selection signatures.
LOCATION:Ray Dolby Auditorium\, Ray Dolby Centre\, Cavendish Laboratory\, 
 JJ Thomson Avenue\, CB3 0US
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