New Academic Year 2026-27

It’s (nearly) new academic year time, so time for a round-up of what’s going on in our group:

• Congratulations to Joe Gibbs, who submitted his PhD, and passed his viva with flying colours. He has now formally received the title of Doctor, though the graduation ceremony in which he will walk up in the fancy gown to shake someone’s hand will not take place until Spring 2027.

• Congratulations of Lloyd La Ronde, who won a ‘best talk’ prize at the UK nuclear physics summer school this year!

• Last time, we mentioned the arrival of Serkan Akkoyun from Sivas Cumhuriyet University in Türkiye for a year-long visit. That has come and gone, and he is now back home. During his time here, he combined his existing expertise in machine learning with some work on quantum computing.

• We are now part of a successful bid for a “doctoral focal award”, which is a consortium of people who will deliver PhD training in a specific area. The overall scheme is for nuclear skills and our particular bid, named PLANET concentrates on nuclear physics, with wider nuclear science and engineering being a focus of other successful bids. The upshot of this is that we will be involved in training PhD students over the next several years on projects with a focus on the nuclear industry. I am pleased to say that our own group will have a student, Aoife Mann, starting in the next couple of weeks. She will work on applications of quantum computing to nuclear structure physics.

• Here’s a snapshot of our outputs in terms of papers submitted and/or published:
  • The preprint I mentioned last time representing the first work from a collaboration with Bhoomika Maheshwari has now been published in the Mazurian Lakes proceedings, as Acta Phys. Pol. B Proc. Suppl. 19, 1-A2 (2026). This has been followed up by a fuller paper exploring the SSVQE (subspace search variational quantum eigensolver) which we have uploaded to arXiv as arXiv:2607.08235.
  • Chandan Sarma and I have won more time on the National Quantum Computing Centre’s access scheme to use real quantum computing hardware, and we have assessed the fidelity of prepared nuclear eigenstates using some specific low-qubit ansatzes. The preprint is at arXiv:2605.30261. Hopefully next time I can report on its publication.
  • Khlood Alharthi’s first thesis paper has been published. It’s an exploration of the role of the surface energy of the nucleus in the prediction of particular vibrational states. I’m really pleased for Khlood, who has been working on her PhD while bringing up four children. The paper is Mod. Phys. Lett. A, 41, 2650137 (2026).
  • Joe Gibbs’ final paper from his thesis has been submitted, and deposited on the arXiv. It looks at a combination of tensor network and quantum compilation methods to produce “sufficiently high” fidelity nuclear eigenstates for probing with algorithms such as the quantum phase estimation. It points towards methods which could be used as fault-tolerant quantum computers are built, and shows one way in which we might get beyond what computationally-classical ab initio methods can achieve. Preprint is at arXiv:2603.11156
  • A first preprint from a Surrey-AWE-PsiQuantum-Hartree Centre collaboration has appeared, which looks at the phase estimation part of the algorithm to determine eigenstates on quantum computer. This again looks forward to the fault-tolerant era, and in the work we come up with resource estimates, in terms of number of qubits and circuit depth, for phase estimation using realistic 2+3-body nuclear Hamiltonians. Preprint is at arXiv:2607.21563.
• Aside from these papers, we’ve been meeting up with other researchers and sharing our work, learning from them, and collaborating in person. I presented a keynote talk on the use of quantum computing in nuclear physics at the Nuclear Structure 2026 conference in Vancouver. Chandan presented our work at the Zakopane Conference in Poland earlier this month. Sam Sullivan presented his work at the UK Nuclear Data conference earlier this month. Lloyd is right now in Milan at a combined school and workshop on quantum computing and many-body methods, presenting a poster.

To end with, here’s an picture from the Nuclear Structure conference, showing the attendees. After some “normal” pictures, the photographer asked as all to do one with out arms in the air. I, being the craven rule-follower that I am, am one of the few in the picture with my arms really up in the air!