Paul D Stevenson

Paul D Stevenson

Nuclear Physics & Quantum Computing

Group Coming to IoP Conference in Liverpool

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The schedule for the upcoming joint HEPP / Astroparticle / Nuclear Physics IoP conference in Liverpool has been announced. My group is pretty well represented, and if you want to follow our work, the schedule is:

  • Monday (8 Apr) Poster Session I 1800-2000:
    • Grant Close (A Time-Dependent Wave-Packet Approach to the 12C + 12C Reaction Using DC-TDHF Potentials).
    • Samuel Sullivan (Optimising Phenomenological Optical Model Parameters to Reproduce Reaction Cross Sections using Particle Swarm Optimisation and a Feed-Forward Neural Network)

  • Tuesday (9 Apr) Plenary Session Tuesday I: 0950-1020:
    • Paul Stevenson (Quantum Algorithms applied to nuclear structure)

  • Tuesday (9 Apr) Exhibitors and Poster Reception II 1800-2000:
    • Khlood Alharthi (A miscroscopic study of 12C+12C fusion interactions)

  • Wednesday (10 Apr) Parallel Sessions: Wednesday I Session H 0900-1030:
    • Bharti Bhoy (Shell-model study pf 58Ni using quantum computing algorithm) 0930-0945

  • Wednesday (10 Apr) Paralllel Sessions: Wednesday II Session H 1100-1230:
    • Isaac Hobday (Finding Excitation Spectra Using a Quantum Computer) 1130-1145
    • Abhishek (Investigation of quadrupole and octupole states in Zr chain using TDHF and QRPA) 1200-1215

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New Paper in Phys Rev C

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Congratulations to Lance Li, my PhD student on the publication of his first paper. It shows how the quantum imaginary time evolution operator can be used to solve nuclear density functional theory on a quantum computer. Physical Review C published the paper today at Phys. Rev. C. 109, 044322 (2024). It’s open access so viewable by all.

Liverpool IoP Highlights

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Last week I and many of my group attended the Institute of Physics joint High Energy Physics, Astroparticle Physics, and Nuclear Physics Conference in Liverpool. I was honoured to be asked to give a plenary talk to the whole conference on the subject of quantum computing in nuclear structure. My colleague in the UK nuclear theoretical physics community, Jacek Dobaczewski from the University of York, took this picture of me as I talked:

Paper updates in 2024

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Our group has had a busy time writing up and submitting some of the work we have been doing, so I thought I’d highlight it here:

New preprint

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This week my student Lance, along with Jim Al-Khalili and me as supervisors, has uploaded a new preprint to the arXiv. The work is a simulated quantum computing implementation of the imaginary time evolution algorithm to drive a quantum system from an initial trial wave function to its ground state. It’s a direct mapping of the classical algorithm, and we are able to see by comparison that the quantum version works correctly. We’ve applied it to the case of nuclear density functional theory, implemented in the wave function representation (i.e. the Kohn-Sham representation). Ultimately the problem is then represented by the single particle wave functions making up the nucleus. We chose the simplest case - spherical helium-4 in which there is only a single unique wave function to have to worry about. As a follow-on, we are working on the next-simplest case, oxygen-16, in which the nuclear density is made of two wave functions, at least in the simplified nuclear model we are considering.