There are lots of ways to find ground states of many-body quantum systems, but what do you do if you want to prepare an excited state? 🤔

That's the question we've addressed in a new preprint, out today: arxiv.org/abs/2508.00065

This appeared on a wall at work recently and it makes me laugh every time I see it. Well played, anonymous art critic. 😄

I'm currently reviewing candidates who applied to my postdoc position, which has required looking back at the job ad that I wrote.

I think I may have to dock myself a few points for my own "ability to communication". 😅

Since coming back to the UK I've been slowly getting reunited with various things I left behind when I moved to France. Today I found the hard drive with all my old recordings and songs on it. It's like a time capsule - I haven't heard some of this stuff in ten years. 🥹

Just leaving this here, from the very beginning of the peer review file of the new Microsoft paper (www.nature.com/articles/s41...).

One of the fun things about being back in Scotland is being reunited with things I stored away when I left for France and haven't seen for years. Things like this...!

Today is a good day. Huge thanks to NVIDIA for supporting my work via their Academic Grant program!

I seem to have turned up to this afternoon's QSL seminar in camouflage. 🥷

As a good friend of mine said earlier today - to lost futures.

I'm having a moral/ethical quandary about this year's APS meeting. I'm deeply uncomfortable at the idea of contributing to events in the US happening under the new political administration, but a boycott of US conferences seems like a feeble, ineffective and possibly misguided way to protest.

Some wonderful news this morning, courtesy of NVIDIA!

I have received two ridiculously big screens and I kind of love them. 😍

(Fret not, I've moved things around to be a bit more ergonomic since this photo was taken. 🙃)

Eight years ago today...!

Best eight years of my life. 🙂

It's turned into a very spin glass heavy week for me, somehow. I gave a talk on (classical) spin glasses to Kipu Quantum, attended a talk on quantum spin glasses by Bernard Derrida, and now I'm writing up notes for a mini-lecture/journal club next week on the dynamics of quantum spin glasses.

Looking forward to getting back to my roots tomorrow and giving a talk to the Kipu Quantum team about spin glasses!

Coming soon...! 😉

I'm always fascinated by old papers from the pre-LaTeX era. They're like a glimpse into another time when science papers were weirdly typeset and a lot harder to read. The ones with handwritten equations are my favourites. 😅

I thought I was kidding when I told people I was moving back to the 'frozen North'. 🥶

I still don't know my way around the building very well, but it's hard to miss the Higgs Centre up on the fourth floor. 😅