Alexander Schuckert

About Me

I am a scientist developing quantum computing methods for scientific discovery in material science, quantum chemistry, and nuclear physics. In my (scarce) free time I ride bikes and fly small planes.

Research: Quantum Simulation

• Hardware-efficient digital quantum simulation using native particles: Can we more efficiently simulate interacting systems consisting of the two fundamental particles in Nature - bosons and fermions - by using quantum computers built from bosons and fermions (in addition to qubits)?
• Near-term fault-tolerant quantum computation: Can we solve non-trivial problems with a small fault-tolerant quantum computer (1000-10000 physical qubits)?
• Thermal observables and transport: Can we find efficient ways to prepare low (but finite) temperature states and then measure transport observables? Does this enable us to solve problems using quantum computers that we couldn’t solve using classical computers in condensed-matter physics, material science and quantum chemistry?

News

• [Feb. 2025] Carefully extracting the range of validity of Fermi’s golden rule - one of the most important pillars of connecting theory to experiments - is the topic of our recent arXiv preprint. We show that the coupling strength of drive and system needs to be surprisingly small, casting doubt on the quantitative validity of previous experiments. Thanks to Jianyi and Songtao from Nir Navon’s lab for bravely venturing into regimes of small signal-to-noise, requiring an extremely careful experimental analysis.
• [Feb. 2025] Another great popular-scientfic article about our 1D finite-energy phase transition work apparead on phys.org.
• [Feb. 2025] Combining digital circuits with analog time evolution, we observe thermal phases and transport in the 2D XY model in Google’s 69 qubit processor - read about it in Nature.
• [Jan. 2025] The New Scientist wrote a great summary of our 1D finite-energy phase transition paper and its implications for future work.
• [Jan. 2025] Our paper on the first observation of a finite-energy phase transition in 1D has appeared in Nature Physics. A big thanks to Or Katz and Chris Monroe at Duke for the fun experiment-theory collaboration!
• [Nov. 2024] In our arXiv preprint on fermion-qubit fault-tolerance, we show how to encode a fermionic logical operator into fermionic atoms, and how fault-tolerant logical gates can be applied. This could potentially lower the resource requirements for simulation of quantum chemistry and material science by orders of magnitude!
• [Oct. 2024] Check out my JQI Seminar talk about the upcoming work on fermionic fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Publications

Note: * indicates equal contribution.