Search arXivSearch

arXiv subjects

Jeremy Clark

Publications and source records attributed to Jeremy Clark.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Superconducting Flux Memory for Cryogenic Applications

We report the development of flux memory for use with superconducting circuits. This technology stores persistent currents in superconducting loops on-chip to be used to provide flux biasing for superconducting circuits, like qubits. We developed three types of flux memory and draw comparisons among them for circuit design. We demonstrate the utility of flux memory by using an in-situ flux detector and characterize each approach and further demonstrate that once flux is set in a memory cell, benchtop DC control sources can be powered off, leaving the on-chip flux bias in place. We propose that flux memory can be arranged in a two-dimensional configuration to multiplex control signals and reduce how line counts scale (N^2 devices -> 2N control lines), and our experimental results pave the path to the proposed scalability. We demonstrate the use of flux memory to flux bias a transmon qubit and show the tunability of the qubit state to a target frequency which remained stable on-chip for 20 hours.

quant-ph

Coherent Phonon Blocking in Superlattices

At cryogenic temperatures, phonons become one of the dominant energy carriers and thus can strongly influence the performance of electronic and sensing devices. In this work, we present a wave-mechanics based framework that predicts phonon transmission and thermal resistance of arbitrarily thick superlattices while retaining all acoustic branches, mode-conversion pathways, and angles of incidence. By enforcing phase coherence, our model predicts frequency-dependent transmission through arbitrary multi-layered structures.We use a genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to efficiently select both materials and layer thicknesses. Our success criterion is that constituent layers satisfy the quarter-wavelength condition of the dominant phonon frequencies at a target temperature. This strategy identifies novel bilayer combinations that achieve thermal resistance of up to 3000 times greater than previously reported superlattices. The identified superlattices are poised to advance any technology that relies on coherent acoustic scattering, from ultra-low-temperature thermal insulation in superconducting flip-chip assemblies to phonon-blocking components in micro- and nano-electromechanical systems.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci

Transmon Phase Gates Controlled by Superconducting Soliton DAC

We introduce a superconducting digital-to-analog converter (DAC) that filters control noise, provides native multiplexing, performs quantum gates in nanoseconds, and can be controlled by CMOS. This is achieved by transducing a trapezoidal drive pulse into a superconducting soliton, which is then held in the DAC load loop, applying flux to a mutually-coupled superconducting qubit or gate coupler. The analog flux output by the DAC can be easily controlled by varying the soliton hold time, or with a DC-biased tunable DAC-qubit coupler, allowing the DAC to perform a fixed-time, high-fidelity gate that's robust to fabrication variance or flux offsets in the quantum circuit. Our initial demonstration shows that the DAC can successfully perform 5.6 ns S-gates on transmons. We measure the DAC-induced quantum state excitation probability per gate to be 0.05%, and find that the DAC-induced relaxation rate from the qubit 1 state is below the intrinsic T1 rate limit of the transmon. Quantum simulations show qualitative agreement with the measured data, and predict that the DAC excitation rate can be lowered 10 times further by overdamping the Josephson junction (JJ) in the DAC load loop. may be limited by a Interleaved Randomized Benchmarking (IRB) sequences on an observer qubit reveal that, when scaling to many qubits, the DAC's performance may be limited by a non-local, DAC-induced phase error of 1.6% per gate, appearing in ancilla qubits that are not directly coupled to any of the 30 DACs on the chip. We discuss strategies for future layouts of multi-DAC chips that focus on mitigating the source of these non-local, high-frequency electromagnetic interactions (EMI), and how to incorporate a DC-tunable coupler for phase correction.

quant-ph

Auditing Blockchain Innovations: Technical Challenges Beyond Traditional Finance

Blockchain technology introduces asset types and custody mechanisms that fundamentally break traditional financial auditing paradigms. This paper presents an autoethnographic analysis of cryptoasset auditing challenges, build on top of prior research on a comprehensive framework addressing existence, ownership, valuation, and internal control verification. Drawing from lived experience implementing blockchain systems as an engineer, smart contract auditor, and CTO of a publicly traded cryptoasset firm, we demonstrate how autoethnographic methodology becomes necessary for understanding technical complexities that external analysis cannot capture. Through detailed examination of token airdrops, multi-signature smart contracts, and real-time on-chain reporting, we provide experimental approaches and common scenarios that auditing firms can analyze to address blockchain innovations currently considered technically insurmountable.

cs.CR

SoK: Market Microstructure for Decentralized Prediction Markets (DePMs)

Decentralized prediction markets (DePMs) allow open participation in event-based wagering without fully relying on centralized intermediaries. We review the history of DePMs which date back to 2011 and includes hundreds of proposals. Perhaps surprising, modern DePMs like Polymarket deviate materially from earlier designs like Truthcoin and Augur v1. We use our review to present a modular workflow comprising eight stages: underlying infrastructure, market topic, share structure and pricing, market initialization, trading, market resolution, settlement, and archiving. For each module, we enumerate the design variants, analyzing trade-offs around decentralization, expressiveness, and manipulation resistance. We also identify open problems for researchers interested in this ecosystem.

cs.CE

Conditional GMC within the stochastic heat flow

We establish that the family of polymer measures $M^{\theta}_{[s,t]}$ associated with the Stochastic Heat Flow (SHF), indexed by $\theta\in\mathbb{R}$, has a conditional Gaussian Multiplicative Chaos (GMC) structure. Namely, taking the random measure $M^{\theta}_{[s,t]}$ as the reference measure, we construct the path-space GMC with noise strength $a > 0$ and prove that the resulting random measure is equal in law to $M^{\theta+a}_{[s,t]}$. As two applications, we prove that the polymer measure and SHF tested against general nonnegative functions are almost surely strictly positive and that the SHF converges to $0$ as $\theta\to\infty$.

math.PR

Quest Love: A First Look at Blockchain Loyalty Programs

Blockchain ecosystems -- such as those built around chains, layers, and services -- try to engage users for a variety of reasons: user education, growing and protecting their market share, climbing metric-measuring leaderboards with competing systems, demonstrating usage to investors, and identifying worthy recipients for newly created tokens (airdrops). A popular approach is offering user quests: small tasks that can be completed by a user, exposing them to a common task they might want to do in the future, and rewarding them for completion. In this paper, we analyze a proprietary dataset from one deployed quest system that offered 43 unique quests over 10 months with 80M completions. We offer insights about the factors that correlate with task completion: amount of reward, monetary value of reward, difficulty, and cost. We also discuss the role of farming and bots, and the factors that complicate distinguishing real users from automated scripts.

cs.CR

Continuum polymer measures corresponding to the critical 2d stochastic heat flow

We construct continuum directed polymer measures corresponding to the critical 2d stochastic heat flow (2d SHF) introduced by Caravenna, Sun, and Zygouras in their recent article [Inventiones mathematicae 233, 325--460 (2023)]. For this purpose, we prove a Chapman-Kolmogorov relation for the 2d SHF along with a related elementary conditional expectation formula. We explore some basic properties of the continuum polymer measures, with our main focus being on their second moments. In particular, we show that the form of their second moments is consistent with the family of continuum polymer measures, indexed by a disorder strength parameter, having a conditional Gaussian multiplicative chaos distributional interrelationship similar to that previously found in an analogous hierarchical toy model.

math.PR

On planar Brownian motion singularly tilted through a point potential

We discuss a family of time-inhomogeneous two-dimensional diffusions, defined over a finite time interval $[0,T]$, having transition density functions that are expressible in terms of the integral kernels for negative exponentials of the two-dimensional Schr\"odinger operator with a point potential at the origin. These diffusions have a singular drift pointing in the direction of the origin that is strong enough to enable the possibly of visiting there, in contrast to a two-dimensional Brownian motion. Our main focus is on characterizing a local time process at the origin analogous to that for a one-dimensional Brownian motion and on studying the law of its process inverse.

math.PR

Weak-disorder limit for directed polymers on critical hierarchical graphs with vertex disorder

We study models for a directed polymer in a random environment (DPRE) in which the polymer traverses a hierarchical diamond graph and the random environment is defined through random variables attached to the vertices. For these models, we prove a distributional limit theorem for the partition function in a limiting regime wherein the system grows as the coupling of the polymer to the random environment is appropriately attenuated. The sequence of diamond graphs is determined by a choice of a branching number $b\in \{2,3,\ldots\}$ and segmenting number $s\in \{2,3,\ldots\}$, and our focus is on the critical case of the model where $b=s$. This extends recent work in the critical case of analogous models with disorder variables placed at the edges of the graphs rather than the vertices.

math.PR

Privacy-Preserving Link Prediction

Consider two data holders, ABC and XYZ, with graph data (e.g., social networks, e-commerce, telecommunication, and bio-informatics). ABC can see that node A is linked to node B, and XYZ can see node B is linked to node C. Node B is the common neighbour of A and C but neither network can discover this fact on their own. In this paper, we provide a two party computation that ABC and XYZ can run to discover the common neighbours in the union of their graph data, however neither party has to reveal their plaintext graph to the other. Based on private set intersection, we implement our solution, provide measurements, and quantify partial leaks of privacy. We also propose a heavyweight solution that leaks zero information based on additively homomorphic encryption.

cs.CR

Not so immutable: Upgradeability of Smart Contracts on Ethereum

A smart contract that is deployed to a blockchain system like Ethereum is, under reasonable circumstances, expected to be immutable and tamper-proof. This is both a feature (promoting integrity and transparency) and a bug (preventing security patches and feature updates). Modern smart contracts use software tricks to enable upgradeability, raising the research questions of how upgradeability is achieved and who is authorized to make changes. In this paper, we summarize and evaluate six upgradeability patterns. We develop a measurement framework for finding how many upgradeable contracts are on Ethereum that use certain prominent upgrade patters. We find 1.4 million proxy contracts which 8,225 of them are unique upgradeable proxy contracts. We also measure how they implement access control over their upgradeability: about 50% are controlled by a single Externally Owned Address (EOA), and about 14% are controlled by multi-signature wallets in which a limited number of persons can change the whole logic of the contract.

cs.CR

TokenHook: Secure ERC-20 smart contract

ERC-20 is the most prominent Ethereum standard for fungible tokens. Tokens implementing the ERC-20 interface can interoperate with a large number of already deployed internet-based services and Ethereum-based smart contracts. In recent years, security vulnerabilities in ERC-20 have received special attention due to their widespread use and increased value. We systemize these vulnerabilities and their applicability to ERC-20 tokens, which has not been done before. Next, we use our domain expertise to provide a new implementation of the ERC-20 interface that is freely available in Vyper and Solidity, and has enhanced security properties and stronger compliance with best practices compared to the sole surviving reference implementation (from OpenZeppelin) in the ERC-20 specification. Finally, we use our implementation to study the effectiveness of seven static analysis tools, designed for general smart contracts, for identifying ERC-20 specific vulnerabilities. We find large inconsistencies across the tools and a high number of false positives which shows there is room for further improvement of these tools.

cs.CR

SoK: Oracles from the Ground Truth to Market Manipulation

One fundamental limitation of blockchain-based smart contracts is that they execute in a closed environment. Thus, they only have access to data and functionality that is already on the blockchain, or is fed into the blockchain. Any interactions with the real world need to be mediated by a bridge service, which is called an oracle. As decentralized applications mature, oracles are playing an increasingly prominent role. With their evolution comes more attacks, necessitating greater attention to their trust model. In this systemization of knowledge paper (SoK), we dissect the design alternatives for oracles, showcase attacks, and discuss attack mitigation strategies.

cs.CR

Lissy: Experimenting with on-chain order books

Financial regulators have long-standing concerns about fully decentralized exchanges that run 'on-chain' without any obvious regulatory hooks. The popularity of Uniswap, an automated market makers (AMM), made these concerns a reality. AMMs implement a lightweight dealer-based trading system, but they are unlike anything on Wall Street, require fees intrinsically, and are susceptible to front-running attacks. This leaves the following research questions we address in this paper: (1) are conventional (i.e., order books), secure (i.e., resistant to front-running and price manipulation) and fully decentralized exchanges feasible on a public blockchain like Ethereum, (2) what is the performance profile, and (3) how much do Layer 2 techniques (e.g., Arbitrum) increase performance? To answer these questions, we implement, benchmark, and experiment with an Ethereum-based call market exchange called Lissy. We confirm the functionality is too heavy for Ethereum today (you cannot expect to exceed a few hundred trade executions per block) but show it scales dramatically (99.88% gas cost reduction) on Arbitrum.

cs.CR

SoK: Blockchain Technology and Its Potential Use Cases

Bitcoin's success has led to significant interest in its underlying components, particularly Blockchain technology. Over 10 years after Bitcoin's initial release, the community still suffers from a lack of clarity regarding what properties defines Blockchain technology, its relationship to similar technologies, and which of its proposed use-cases are tenable and which are little more than hype. In this paper we answer four common questions regarding Blockchain technology: (1) what exactly is Blockchain technology, (2) what capabilities does it provide, and (3) what are good applications for Blockchain technology, and (4) how does it relate to other approache distributed technologies (e.g., distributed databases). We accomplish this goal by using grounded theory (a structured approach to gathering and analyzing qualitative data) to thoroughly analyze a large corpus of literature on Blockchain technology. This method enables us to answer the above questions while limiting researcher bias, separating thought leadership from peddled hype and identifying open research questions related to Blockchain technology. The audience for this paper is broad as it aims to help researchers in a variety of areas come to a better understanding of Blockchain technology and identify whether it may be of use in their own research.

cs.CR

Continuum models of directed polymers on disordered diamond fractals in the critical case

We construct and study a family random continuum polymer measures $\mathbf{M}_{r}$ corresponding to limiting partition function laws recently derived in a weak-coupling regime of polymer models on hierarchical graphs with marginally relevant disorder. The continuum polymers, which we refer to as directed paths, are identified with isometric embeddings of the unit interval $[0,1]$ into a compact diamond fractal with Hausdorff dimension two, and there is a natural 'uniform' probability measure, $\mu$, over the space of directed paths, $\Gamma$. Realizations of the random path measures $\mathbf{M}_{r}$ exhibit strong localization properties in comparison to their subcritical counterparts when the diamond fractal has dimension less than two. Whereas two paths $p,q\in \Gamma$ sampled independently using the pure measure $\mu$ have only finitely many intersections with probability one, a realization of the disordered product measure $ \mathbf{M}_{r}\times \mathbf{M}_{r}$ a.s. assigns positive weight to the set of pairs of paths $(p,q)$ whose intersection sets are uncountable but of Hausdorff dimension zero. We give a more refined characterization of the size of these dimension-zero sets using generalized (logarithmic) Hausdorff measures. The law of the random measure $\mathbf{M}_{r}$ cannot be constructed as a subcritical Gaussian multiplicative chaos because the coupling strength to the Gaussian field would, in a formal sense, have to be infinite.

math.PR

Weak-disorder limit at criticality for directed polymers on hierarchical graphs

We prove a distributional limit theorem conjectured in [Journal of Statistical Physics 174, No. 6, 1372-1403 (2019)] for partition functions defining models of directed polymers on diamond hierarchical graphs with disorder variables placed at the graphical edges. The limiting regime involves a joint scaling in which the number of hierarchical layers, $n\in \mathbb{N}$, of the graphs grows as the inverse temperature, $\beta\equiv \beta(n)$, vanishes with a fine-tuned dependence on $n$. The conjecture pertains to the marginally relevant disorder case of the model wherein the branching parameter $b \in \{2,3,\ldots\}$ and the segmenting parameter $s \in \{2,3,\ldots\}$ determining the hierarchical graphs are equal, which coincides with the diamond fractal embedding the graphs having Hausdorff dimension two. Unlike the analogous weak-disorder scaling limit for random polymer models on hierarchical graphs in the disorder relevant $b<s$ case (or for the (1+1)-dimensional polymer on the rectangular lattice), the distributional convergence of the partition function when $b=s$ cannot be approached through a term-by-term convergence to a Wiener chaos expansion, which does not exist for the continuum model emerging in the limit. The analysis proceeds by controlling the distributional convergence of the partition functions in terms of the Wasserstein distance through a perturbative generalization of Stein's method at a critical step. In addition, we prove that a similar limit theorem holds for the analogous model with disorder variables placed at the vertices of the graphs.

math-ph