Paul D Stevenson

Paul D Stevenson

Nuclear Physics & Quantum Computing

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:

• First; the paper I mentioned in the last post has now been accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. C - well done to PhD student Lance on your first paper!

• Lance has followed up that first paper with a second one extending the method of his first paper to deal with systems in which there are multiple different single particle states in play and so the quantum algorithm developed has to solve coupled nonlinear differential equations. So far it’s just on the arXiv and we’re thinking about where to submit it, and see what comments we get.

• Bharti Bhoy’s first paper on our shell-model-on-quantum-computer project is up on the arXiv. We’ve submitted it to a special edition of New Journal of Physics, being semi-officially linked to the grant programme funding it.

• My PhD student Isaac has submitted a first substantial paper to Phys. Rev. C. This follows up a couple of conference proceedings with prepartory work (here and here)

• A collaboration with Yue Shi and Nobuo Hinohara has led to a preprint submitted to Comput. Phys. Commun. which describes a new C++ code implementing time-dependent density functional theory. Yue wrote the code, and I worked closely with him on comparing term by term with my Sky3D code to ensure correctness of both codes.

• … and finally, Joe Gibbs has submitted a paper with me and his external co-supervisor Zoë Holmes in which we make use of a symmetric wave function ansatz to target the ground state in a quantum algorithm.

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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:

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.