News and Outreach
ARPA-E Award: Rare-Earth-Free Quantum Magnetism
The Gull group is a partner in a $3.9M ARPA-E award led by Alice & Bob, together with Los Alamos National Laboratory and GE Vernova’s Advanced Research accelerator. The three-year project aims to use quantum computing to discover high-performance permanent magnets that do not rely on rare-earth elements — addressing a critical vulnerability in the supply chains for clean energy and industrial technologies. The Gull group contributes classical many-body algorithms designed to work alongside quantum algorithms, bridging the two approaches for realistic materials calculations.
IEEE Spectrum: Quantum Computers Hunt Rare-Earth-Free Magnets
IEEE Spectrum covers the challenge of designing rare-earth-free permanent magnets — and why quantum computing may be the key to cracking it. Over 67,000 magnetic compounds exist, yet none surpass the performance of neodymium-iron-boron magnets, whose supply chain is concentrated in China. The Alice & Bob–led collaboration, which includes the Gull group, is using quantum computers to navigate this combinatorially vast search space, exploiting superposition and entanglement to simulate electron behavior across crystal lattices that classical computers cannot handle at scale.
ERC Advanced Grant: Quantum Algorithms
The Gull group has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for the project Quantum Algorithms, supporting research on quantum computing and many-body simulation methods at the University of Warsaw.
Undergraduate Proposes Solution to Quantum Field Theory Problem
University of Michigan undergraduate Jiani Fei proposed a solution to a long-standing problem in quantum simulation: how to accurately convert calculations performed in imaginary time into real, measurable quantities. Working with Emanuel Gull, Fei showed that Nevanlinna functions — named after Finnish mathematician Rolf Nevanlinna’s 1925 theory — guarantee the conversion process is always causal, dramatically sharpening the resolution of spectral features near the Fermi energy that were previously inaccessible. The work, published in Physical Review Letters, applies across quantum field theories from lattice QCD to superconductors, and connects to fields as distant as industrial control theory.