Steven Thomson

Another platform means another intro! I'm a quantum condensed master theorist (and occasional quantum computing/information pretender) currently setting up a new research group at the beautiful University of Edinburgh. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Recruiting postdocs and PhD students soon! www.steventhomson.co.uk

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

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. 🥹

More and more content with my decision not to go to the APS Global Physics Summit this year, and if this is how things are going then I'm disinclined to travel to the US for any other meetings in the near future. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Not much time left to apply for this - the deadline is on Monday, so get those applications in quick if you're interested in joining the University of Edinburgh to work on exciting challenges in open quantum systems!

What I'll definitely do is make a serious attempt at writing the "Cond Mat Phys for Quantum Computer Scientists" tutorial paper I've been threatening to write for years. I think it's important that people are equipped to distinguish realistic use cases of quantum computers from straw man arguments.

I've never been tempted to write a "Comment on..." paper before, but today is teaching me that there's a first time for everything. 👀

I never posted an update on this, but in the end I declined to participate in this year's APS meeting. I can't in good conscience travel to and contribute to an event in the US while the current administration is causing so much harm to people and communities I care about.

Microsoft's extraordinary claim last month—to have created a bonafide topological qubit—was met with caution by many experts. Now, a physicist is raising specific and substantive concerns about a key test that underlies Microsoft's approach. My reporting: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I have synaesthesia, but I can't say it helped my language skills any! It took me a long time to pick up French, and my German never really got past elementary level. 😬 Maths though, that's another story - I do think it really helps me navigate complex equations. 🤔 www.bbc.com/future/artic...

I've done PhD interviews before, but today was the first time I was ever on a panel alongside someone who once offered me a PhD place...! Such a surreal feeling to now be on the same side of the fence as people who I've admired and respected since I was an undergrad. 😅

I had made Microsoft Quantum aware of issues before publication of this latest Nature paper (which uses it tune up their devices). Since they seem to not care, I have make these issues public. In short: The topological gap protocol and all claims based on it are flawed. arxiv.org/abs/2502.19560

In their roadmap, Microsoft described a protocol for demonstrating a topologically protected qubit. There is no publicly available evidence that this test has been conducted successfully. I hope we will hear more soon. arxiv.org/abs/2502.12252

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

I'm hiring a postdoc in quantum condensed matter theory! This will be a 3 year position, with a focus on developing and using novel numerical techniques to investigate open quantum systems. For further info and to apply, see the following: elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Last week taught me two main things. 1) I actually can write and deliver two entirely new talks on two entirely different subjects within the same week, while balancing all sorts of other tasks. 2) I should never do this again. 😅

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.

Hello! 👋 Who’s here on Bluesky from the quantum community? Follow recommendations welcome!

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.

Obligatory 'first day back at work, trying to remember what I do for a living' post. 😅

The NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPU is, obviously, not the same as the NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPU which you can tell by the fact that almost all of the letters are identical and in the same order. NVIDIA must be following the Ibanez guitars school of naming things. (I'm looking at you, RGIT27FE-NTF.)

Some wonderful news this morning, courtesy of NVIDIA!

Why is anyone allowed to call these tools “intelligence”? Surely advertising standards should intervene. It’s machine learning, which is really just advanced statistics. It’s not intelligent, and it can’t be trusted to get the sense of a text right. Calling it intelligence is dangerously seductive.

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. 🙃)

This is actually one of the most sober, balanced articles about Willow that I've seen so far. No breathless hype, no vitriolic hate. Nice job, PC Gamer. www.pcgamer.com/hardware/goo...

Submissions for QCTiP 2025 are now open.

Time is running out to apply for a Bell Burnell PhD scholarship at the University of Edinburgh. If you're eligible, get in touch with us before December 10th! I'd be overjoyed to support anyone interested in applying for one of these scholarships to join my team. www.iop.org/about/suppor...

Hey #Quantumsky 👋🏾 This is an attempt at indexing the growing quantum community here on Bluesky. Please let me know if you'd like to be added to the list. Genuinely happy to see what looks like a successful migration from the birdsite 😄 go.bsky.app/VHXg1yi

Time is running out to apply for a Bell Burnell PhD scholarship at the University of Edinburgh. If you're eligible, get in touch with us before December 10th! I'd be overjoyed to support anyone interested in applying for one of these scholarships to join my team. www.iop.org/about/suppor...

Eight years ago today...! Best eight years of my life. 🙂

Really enjoyed tonight's (belated) inaugural lecture by Prof. Christos Leonidopoulos about the Higgs boson and the future of high energy physics. Being surrounded by so much inspiring stuff at Edinburgh has me more excited about physics than I've been in a long time. 😃

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!

I've been in this job for 26 days and I'm already drowning in a sea of emails that I haven't had time to respond to. Have I just leveled up as an academic?

Here we go! I'm advertising two PhD projects in the School of Physics & Astronomy! One is all about developing new ways to model open quantum systems: www.ph.ed.ac.uk/phd-projects... The other is about disorder and many-body localisation: www.ph.ed.ac.uk/phd-projects... Just ask for more info!

Upon a closer look, it's also exciting to see that the authors may have found a very simple way around one of the main sources of error I encountered in the long-time dynamics, which is very cool indeed. 😃

Wishing the Elsevier editors who desk-accepted this all the best for their next career moves. doi.org/10.1016/j.ij...