After completing my first year at ICFO in Barcelona under the supervision of Antonio Acín, it was time for me to move to Toulouse and work with Victor Magron at LAAS-CNRS for 10 months. These 10 months have been an enriching experience for me, due to fruitful collaborations within and outside of our doctoral network, attendances of international conferences, and the chance to improve my French.
During my time in Toulouse I worked on several projects of which one is published as a preprint. I’m particularly happy about this collaboration as it is a joint work with DC13, Llorenç Balada Gaggioli: We extended a method by Araújo et al. to obtain bounds on non-commutative optimization problems with differential constraints to also deal with time-dependent variables without explicit differential evolution equation. This allowed us to obtain reachability and optimal-time bounds on many different problems in quantum control, the subject of optimally controlling a quantum system by steering its time evolution. The related preprint is released on arXiv:2606.24645 and submitted for publication in a scientific journal.
As a second main project I’m currently working with my supervisors Antonio Acín and Victor Magron together with Jie Wang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences to build a semidefinite hierarchy to bound thermodynamical quantities of quantum systems. Besides these two collaborations I’m currently working with a former colleague from Paris who is working on analogue optimization and neuromorphic computing at the University of Cambridge. I visited him for a week in May, where we worked on our joint project idea and where I presented my work on semidefinite optimization hierarchies to the pi-computing group in a talk.
Alongside those scientific projects I was also attending several international conferences to present my work. I was giving research talks at the VeriQtas Consortium Conference in March in Lyon, presented a poster at the conference on Quantum Geometry in Mexico City, and held further research talks at the SIAM Optimization Conference in Edinburgh and at the TENORS Workshop 2 in Trento. I’m very happy for these opportunities to talk about my work, and to improve my scientific communication skills due to the different audiences I was presenting to.
Taking everything together, my time in Toulouse was a great professional and personal success, and I’m looking forward for the next step of my PhD journey, where I’m going to have an internship with Quandela in Paris. As a last (less scientific) impression one picture of me and Llorenç visiting the historical site of Teotihuacan during our conference trip in Mexico.
