Today, I reached a milestone in my senior summer’s long research project, as well as my career as a physicist. As a 2024 Berkeley Physics Pi2 scholar, I have been working in the Zaletel group on approximate-simulation of quantum dynamics in many-body systems, and today, I finished the report on my summertime accomplishments. Although this is far from a published paper, this was the first time I’ve worked on an original research topic. The report is intended to be readable by anyone who has an undergraduate understanding of the formalism of quantum mechanics, and is competent with finite-dimensional linear algebra. I think the SPD discussion (II.D) is a particularly readable explanation of the core idea behind this research. This project introduced me to a lot of interesting ideas in a modern research field, and I’m proud of the work I’ve done so far. We did something novel and interesting, and the work shows promising results for new methods in the field. As a mere undergraduate, I could not ask for a better first, real research project.
Of course, I faced many setbacks.
I juggled way too many commitments this summer (as usual),
which definitely inhibited my rate of progress.
In fact, this report was ostensibly due four days ago, but who’s keeping track lol.
My simulation code is not very pretty, and a lot of
easily-automated functionality was instead horrendously copy-pasted across multiple cells,
having me manually change variable names back and forth, among other grave programming felonies.
Latex formatting hell is as excruciating and mind-meltingly irritating as usual.
I’m convinced Latex figures definitely violate locality… possible QM implications are
pending.
I’d like to especially thank my Pi2 mentor Sajant Anand, who provided both expert insight in the unfamiliar, research-level cutting-edge physics, and excellent guidance in designing my tasks to optimally allow me both room to think independently and solve problems, while not leaving me lost in the sea of my inexperience. Some mentions go to Andrew Binder, who brought down the divine wisdom of Latex floating hacks from Sinai, and Alexander Shtov, whose objection to the grammatical ambiguity of the antecedent of “which” found in paragraph 2 of II.A provided me a much needed boost of conciousness during a prolonged abstention from sleep. After a short deliberation, my response to you is: skill issue lol.
Without further ado, I hereby present my 2024 Pi2 report,
entitled Simulating Time-Evolution of Quantum Systems using Sparse Pauli Dynamics.
Happy reading,
Adarsh Iyer