Postdoctoral Research Associate in Quantum Many-Body Systems

About us

The Department of Physics at King’s College London is part of the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences.

This role sits within a collaborative quantum science project at King’s on quantum algorithms and numerical methods for many-body dynamics beyond the reach of standard classical simulation.

About the role

We have a high preference for a candidates who is willing to start imminently, and before mid October this year. The project intended for the post-doc is part of a collaboration within my group on the Google Willow Chip project (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd7pwezyze1o) for which we require quick delivery.

The goal of this recruitment is to appoint one postdoctoral researcher who will deliver complementary parts of a funded project on simulating highly occupied bosons coupled to qubits. Achieving this is important because many classically intractable problems in energy, materials and technology involve coupled fermionic, bosonic and qubit-like degrees of freedom, yet bosonic dynamics remain difficult to access on near-term quantum hardware. The difficulty is that the relevant Hilbert spaces grow rapidly, the dynamics are non-Gaussian and nonlinear, and the circuits must be mapped carefully to hardware topology while retaining useful observables. 

The project addresses this by combining circuit co-design for Google's Willow processor, and classical benchmarking using Pauli propagation and tensor network methods. The posts will focus on classical benchmarking, including Pauli propagation, tensor networks and related numerical methods for simulating smaller systems and comparing them with quantum results.

This is a full-time post (35 hours per week), and you will be offered an fixed-term contract of 9 months. 

Remote working arrangements can be found.

Research staff at King’s are entitled to at least 10 days per year (pro-rata) for professional development. This entitlement, from the  Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers, applies to Postdocs, Research Assistants, Research and Teaching Technicians, Teaching Fellows and AEP equivalent up to and including grade 7. Visit the  Centre for Research Staff Development for more information.

About you

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria 

1. PhD qualified in a relevant subject area, such as theoretical physics, computational physics, quantum information, quantum computing, applied mathematics, computer science or a closely related discipline. Candidates who have submitted their thesis and are awaiting award may be considered under the standard King’s Grade 6 research clause.
2. Strong research experience in tensor networks, pauli propagation, quantum information, quantum algorithms, many-body physics, quantum simulation, computational physics or a closely related area.
3. Strong written and oral communication skills, including the ability to contribute to publications, reports & presentations.
4. Excellent programming skills in Python, Julia, C++ or a comparable scientific-computing language, with evidence of producing reliable research code.
5. Ability to carry out independent numerical research, validate results and communicate technical assumptions clearly.
6. Ability to work effectively in a collaborative research environment involving academic and external partners.
7. Commitment to open, reproducible and well-documented research practice, including appropriate data and software management.

Desirable criteria

1. Experience with tensor network algorithms, Pauli propagation, exact diagonalisation or other classical simulation methods for quantum many-body systems.
2. Research experience with bosonic systems, fermion-boson models, spin-boson models, neural or threshold dynamics, or analogue/digital quantum simulation.
3. Experience with high-performance computing, GPU acceleration, automated benchmarking or large-scale numerical workflows.
4. Evidence of self-motivated contributing to collaborative research outputs, open-source software, preprints, peer-reviewed publications or conference presentations.