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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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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:
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The schedule for the upcoming joint HEPP / Astroparticle / Nuclear Physics IoP conference in Liverpool has been announced. My group is pretty well represented, and if you want to follow our work, the schedule is:
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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.
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I’ve (finally?) moved my website from the Unviersity of Surrey’s personal account server to github, where I’ve built it on top of the “academic pages” style. I must admit, I find it easier to write the bare HTML of my simple previous version of my professional home page, but this seems to be the future. I intend to use this “blog” facility for research-related news stories. See the blogger link in the side panel for my real nuclear physics blog!