Martin J. Savage

Faculty

Professor of Physics
PI: InQubator for Quantum Simulation

Publications/Impact

Research Interests

Quantum Simulations of Lattice field theories for nuclear physics
Lattice Gauge Theory for nuclear physics
Effective Field Theory for nuclear physics
Entanglement in many-body systems and strong interactions

Education

BSc University of Auckland (1984)
MSc University of Auckland (1985)
PhD California Institute of Technology (1990)

Biography

My scientific research activities are now focused on learning and applying quantum computing and quantum information theory to Grand Challenge problems in nuclear physics. The classical computing resources required for precise QCD (lattice) predictions in finite-density systems, in non-equilibrium systems, and in fragmentation are estimated to be beyond exascale, in general, due to the sign problem in sampling the path integral and due to calculations being performed in Euclidean space. As a founding member of the NPLQCD lattice QCD collaboration (2004), we developed and applied lattice QCD techniques to perform calculations of light nuclei and few baryon systems. The precision of many such calculations are limited by the computational resources that are available, the need for which is determined, in part, by the signal-to-noise problem (a sign problem). Quantum computing offers the possibility of in the future computing finite density systems, both static and dynamic, in Minkowski space with high precision. With increasing access to quantum devices, we are developing algorithms for quantum field theories and nuclear effective field theories to solve these systems on present-day and future quantum computers.