Paul D Stevenson

Paul D Stevenson

Nuclear Physics & Quantum Computing

Group updates June 2025

1 minute read

Published:

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.

You May Also Enjoy

Group updates Feb 2025

1 minute read

Published:

Here are some recent updates from our research group, since my last update here in September:

Solving coupled non-linear differential equations on quantum computer

1 minute read

Published:

This week, we (PhD student Lance, co-supervisor Jim, and me) have published a new paper on a method of solution of non-linear coupled Schrödinger equtions on quantum computer.
It’s the continuation of some previous work where we employed the quantum imaginary time method to solve nuclear density functional problems in a simple model. In the new work, we wanted to make the model more realistic and less simple, and this meant solving simultaneously for multiple single particle wave functions, each of which are subject to slightly different Schrödinger equations, but which couple together through a density-depedendent term. Rather than present this work as specifically a way to solve the nuclear physics problem, we decided to send it to a more general journal which was running a special issue on quantum computing technology in the hope of reaching a wider audience. I guess we will see if it gets widely read and cited, but the referee, at least, agreed that it was worth publishing, at least after a round of comments / updates. The paper does not yet have its final volume and article number designation, but is online at the EPJ Special Topics journal site.

A Comment on Li et al.

less than 1 minute read

Published:

A recent paper by Li et al. introduced a variance minimization quantum algorithm. As one of their examples, they took a much-used nuclear physics case: A one-body model of the deuteron. Unfortunately, their presentation was a bit problematic, so I wrote a comment to submit to the journal (Physica Scripta) to try to correct the record. The comment was rejected by the editor, so I present the comment here instead, for the record - link at end of post. I would have put it on the arXiv, but they don’t publish comments of papers unless those papers are in the arXiv.