Group updates June 2025

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Some group updates as we get to the end of the academic year.

• Lance Li and Isaac Hobday have completely finished their PhDs with all minor corrections accepted by the examiners, and the final thesis deposited in the University repository. Isaac’s is Variational Quantum Algorithms to Find Excitation Spectra of Nuclear Physical Models and Lance’s is A quantum computing solution to the nuclear Hartree-Fock equation. It’s nice that the University now issues digital object identifiers (DOIs) to make the theses easier to share and cite. You can grab the full theses and citation information in the links above.

• Since summer is starting, we have some MSc students joining the group: Lloyd, James, and Robbie will be doing quantum computing projects, and Adam a nuclear physics one. More on that either here or on my http://blogoftheisotopes.blogspot.com when the projects get going

• A paper on solving Diophantine equations on quantum computers has been published as Lara Tatli and Paul Stevenson, Math. Prob. Comp. Sci. 63, 60 (2025). This was some work that grew out of a summer vacation projcet done by Lara, who is an undergraduate at Durham Uni. It is my first paper in this journal which I found by searching on the Directory of Open Access Journals. It has the benefit that as well as being open access, there are no article processing charges, so there was nothing for us to pay to have it published.

• I was interviewed by a journalist working on piece for the Live Science website on the question of why nuclei have the shape they do. After interviewing me and Dave Jenkins from York, she wrote up a nice piece quoting us both. Here it is.