Here’s a recent smattering of interesting papers.

• Perhaps no genre of paper excites me more than the reinterpretation of an existing object in a new framework. A recent preprint Li and Fisher [1] exemplifies this. The connection between error correction and other domains is intuitively sensible, if not obvious to formalise. I think there is a potentially fruitful avenue for exploration of the idea of error correcting codes defining domains, which at certain “temperatures” (error rates) undergo a phase change where correction is no longer viable.
• Another good example is a paper about conformal field theory [2], which is cool. By defining a notion of “magic”, the authors quantify a notion separate from entanglement to characterise quantum operations. Again, this is something that is on the surface intuitive, but non-trivial to describe explicitly.

1. Y. Li and M. P. A. Fisher, (2020). https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.03822
2. C. D. White, C. J. Cao, and B. Swingle, (2020). https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.01303