Category: News

In September this year, my good college Morten Førre and I had the pleasure of being invited by Katarzyna Krajewska to her group in Warsaw. Recently, they have developed a promising method for studying with photo ionization of atoms computationally. PhD student Mihai Suster is central in this development work.

Typically, atoms and molecules exposed to strong laser field, which, incidentally, was the topic of this year’s Nobel prize in physics, are described theoretically and computationally without considering magnetic interactions. However, with strong enough fields and low/high enough photon energies, this approach breaks down – rendering the problem much tougher.

This was one of several topics for discussion.

Morten and I also had the pleasure to learn about ongoing activities within quantum information technology at the University of Warsaw – both theoretically and experimentally. We were quite impressed by their various labs – and their efficient setups.

Impressive was also a relevant word for describing the city. Well worth a visit!

We thank our hosts, Katarzyna, Julia, Deeksha, Jurek, and Mihai, so much for their overwhelming hospitality and hope that we can return the favor at some point.

-Sølve Selstø

On Thursday 21st of September OsloMet’s QuntumHub and DQUANT hosted an introductory quantum science event called QuantumHub day – a free and open event for everyone!

The event is aimed to spark interest and educate people about arguably one of the most disruptive and influential technologies known to date.

Here, attendees were introduced to the quantum science field and got the chance to try Norway’s first quantum computers! Furthermore, the event included the experience of quantum dynamics at close range and the possibility to play Quantum Moves with wave functions. During the event, attendees were rewarded a free QuantumHub t-shirt.

QuntumHub day was an insightful and inspiring event which was met with good feedback and left new people interested and hopefully more knowledgeable in the field of Quantum mechanics and computing.

As a part of our contributions to this year’s Forskningsdagene, the OsloMet Quantum Hub had the pleasure of contributing to OsloMet’s actitiveis at Holmlia. The Makerspace at our faculty was responsible for making Ungforsk happen – with an very interesting program put together to spur the curiosity of youth school pupils. Indeed an impressive job planning, announcing and implementing. Kudos to Notto Thelle, Kersti Fosse Blålid – and all other colleges and voluenteers involved. Read more about what went on at Ungforsk here:

https://www.oslomet.no/om/nyheter/ungforsk-2023

Slightly younger pupils were invited to a mini-Forskningstorg where one of the stands was dedicated to introducing them to quantum technology. Thanks, Aleksandar Davidov, Bendik Dalen and Kristian Wold, for your efforts!

The events took place 20th and 21st of September. A total of 400 pupils got a glimpse of quantum technology – first and foremost through playing Quantum Moves – a game developed at Aarhus University addressing quantum control and adiabatic quantum computing. Actually, the game is surprisingly addictive …

Friday 8th of september, Diedrik Leijenaar Oksens finished his master project entitled Constructing Quantum Gates Using
Optimization Techniques.

In his work Diedrik started out with a model with two interacting qubits in the form of spin 1/2-particles exposed to the same, dynamic magnetic field. The first aim was to tailor this field so that we could construct specific quantum gates. The next part, the harder one, was to introduce noise and see if we could mitigate this noise by adjusting the magnetic field. The answer to this question was, unfortunately, nah.

Diedrik’s project included the development of a rather advanced MATLAB implementation. Not only did he solve a complex and highly non-convex optimization problem, he also did so by for cost landscapes for which each point required the repeated solution of dynamical equations. Here is one illustration of such a landscape:

This, in turn, involved both the “traditional” Schrödinger equation and the more involved Lindblad equation, the latter for introducing non-reversible noise mechanisms.

The fact that this implementation, in the end, is quite generic – and relies on rather abstract theoretical concepts, renders his work even more impressive.

As I am sure this very text reflects, we, his advisors, are quite proud of Diedrik’s acheivements.

For the next one, we’ll have to see if we can find other ways of mitigating decoherence …

Quantum Hub member A. Laestadius was together with Prof. M. Herbst (EPFL Lausanne) invited for a two-week research in pair visit at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach (MFO) in Germany at the end of August 2023. During the stay similarities of numerical and analytical approaches to Kohn-Sham inversion were explored. The forward Kohn-Sham method is an extremely popular approach in quantum chemistry, and its inverse version allows for mathematical studies of importance for the forward scheme.