Undergrad physics student co-publishes paper

When undergraduate student Alex Martin came across a physics concept he hadn’t seen before, he decided to look into it.

“Initially, it was the name,” he laughed. “The name sounds pretty cool.”

Alex searched for academic papers that would help him get a basic understanding of the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm, but came up mostly empty-handed.

“I couldn’t find any accessible papers,” Alex said. “Like, they were way over my head. All of them. Very few of them went into depth about how the algorithm functions.”

But his curiosity kept him going.

“On the first day of my Quantum Computing class, Alex asked if we were going to cover the variational quantum eigensolver,” said Physics Professor Dr. Jeff Martin. “I responded ‘What’s that?’”

After exploring the topic himself, Dr. Martin developed an example for the class. That led to the pair co-publishing an academic paper in the European Journal of Physics.

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