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As Jeffrey Wack walked across the graduation stage in May 2022, he carried with him a lot of uncertainty about where to go next. His trepidation came from his voracious curiosity for a broad range of things, primarily within physics and math—the subjects of his two degrees—but also from his interests in teaching, outreach and music. The prospect of having to pick just one path forward felt confining to Wack. But that same curiosity served him extremely well during his time at the University of Maryland, and it left him with many opportunities for next steps.Wack collected an impressive resume at UMD. He taught an introductory course on nuclear physics and reactor operations, studied physics in Florence, participated in an optomechanics research project that resulted in a publication, made significant contributions to experimental research with coplanar waveguides, and co-taught a self-designed course on music theory and math. Since graduating, he began working as a fellow at the Museum of Math in New York City, sampling the working world while contemplating graduate school.

While browsing the web, you might not realize that the security of your online transactions is guaranteed by a hard-to-crack math problem called factoring. But this security could evaporate in an instant—if a big enough quantum computer is built. Computers that store information in quantum hardware—like individual ions, atoms or photons—would make quick work of the factoring problem and threaten the safety of current protocols. To thwart the threat posed by possible quantum computers, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been running a kind of competition.

There is a heated race to make quantum computers deliver practical results. But this race isn't just about making better technology—usually defined in terms of having fewer errors and more qubits, which are the basic building blocks that store quantum information. At least for now, the quantum computing race requires grappling with the complex realities of both quantum technologies and difficult problems. To develop quantum computing applications, researchers need to understand a particular quantum technology and a particular challenging problem and then adapt the strengths of the technology to address the intricacies of the problem. Theoretical nuclear physicist Zohreh Davoudi, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Maryland (UMD) and a member of the Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics, has been working with multiple colleagues at UMD to ensure that the problems that she cares about are among those benefiting from early advances in quantum computing. Davoudi and JQI Fellow Norbert Linke are collaborating to push the frontier of both the theories and technologies of quantum simulation through research that uses current quantum computers. Their research is intended to illuminate a path toward simulations that can cut through the current blockade of fiendishly complex calculations and deliver new theoretical predictions. The team’s current efforts might help nuclear physicists, including Davoudi, to take advantage of the early benefits of quantum computing instead of needing to rush to catch up when quantum computers hit their stride.In a new paper in PRX Quantum, Davoudi, Linke and their colleagues have combined theory and experiment to push the boundaries of quantum simulations—testing the limits of both the ion-based quantum computer in Linke’s lab and proposals for simulating quantum fields.

Elizabeth Bennewitz, a first-year physics graduate student at JQI and the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS), has received a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. Bennewitz is one of 33 recipients in 2022—the largest number of students this program has ever selected in a year.