Paul D Stevenson

Paul D Stevenson

Nuclear Physics & Quantum Computing

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:

me at IoP conference

I hope my talk was sufficiently understandable and useful to people across all the communities present. I got some kind comments afterwards, so that’s encouraging.

As well as me talking, my students Grant and Sam did a great job in the poster sessions, my student Isaac and my postdocs Bharti and Abhishek gave talks in the parallel sessions. As usual, the event included a conference dinner, which was in a hotel on the riverfront in Liverpool, which was a nice social event, though with young children in my house, my usual hours of being away do not extend to the 11pm I got to bed that day!

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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.

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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:

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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.