The book Electronic Structure Theory Modeling:Connections Between Theory and Software by Trindle and Shillady came out. The book seems to be very complete (I ordered a copy) and features my work on linear-scaling quantum Monte Carlo, and the Zori code in the quantum Monte Carlo chapter.

Today is our third wedding anniversary. Dori and I married in 2005. She and I have had a great time together, and we already have lived in two cities and three apartments, gone to two campuses, had two cars, and ate at many sushi restaurants.

Tonight, we had sushi again to celebrate.

It has been a while (almost a semester) since I last attended the excellent quantum computing group meetings organized by Eddie Farhi. Many people from the Boston Area interested in quantum computing meet weekly at the institute for theoretical physics at MIT. These meetings have been important for my lab to remain connected with the quantum information community. There, I met Stephen Jordan and Seth Lloyd, who are now collaborators and co-authors on a few papers. I plan to attend as many meetings as I can from now on, when I am not on travel (next Monday, I will be in Urbana-Champaign). This semester, my laboratory took off with even more momentum, and I have been busy with in-house things, which has forced me to miss these meetings at MIT for one reason or other. Most often, it has been because we had been meeting with the DARPA SERS team (Ken Crozier and Eric Mazur).

Yesterday, Peter Young, from UC Santa Cruz’s Physics department gave a talk about the complexity of the adiabatic quantum algorithm (<- click to download his slides). The quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) algorithm allowed him to test the gap for typical instances of the exact cover NP-hard problem for up to 128 spins. Peter Young and his co-authors found that up to 128 spins, the scaling is still polynomial. For classical algorithms like WALKSAT, he found a crossover from polynomial to exponential. The open question, of course, is if the adiabatic algorithm will have a cross over at a certain size. He is working on extending his QMC calculations to 256 spins. Hopefully, it still has an advantage for that size.

This talk connects two of my interests: quantum information and quantum Monte Carlo.

More QMC news: Sangwoo Shim, a graduate student in my laboratory, is gearing up to become our local Harvard Chemistry QMC expert, and he is attending The Towler Institute Summer School of Quantum Monte Carlo, organized by Mike Towler. Mike’s conferences are excellent. I had great fun at the TTI conference last year (as for example, this photo or this one attest), and plan to attend it bi-yearly to stay abreast with the field. Also, I saw the source code of what will soon become Zori 2.0. Brian Austin did an excellent job and I am excited of trying it out. We are using Assembla.com for most of our projects, and we love it. Zori 2.0 will be hosted using that service.

Link: Mark Dewing’s Quantum Monte Carlo blog.

On Friday, I went to Grafton Street for a one-hour drink with Mike Stopa, my friend and collaborator. It’s a good way for both of us to wind down after a week of hard work. We have met together two weeks in a row now, and this weekly gathering may become a tradition. The week before, we were accompanied by a few members of the lab as well.

From left to right: Myself, Ville Bergholm, Masoud Mohseni, Ivan Kassal, Patrick Rebentrost and Mike Stopa, two weeks ago (June, 2008).

Mike and I were talking about many things, ranging from family to our new collaboration unraveling the secrets of the chemical enhancement effect in SERS. As we were about to leave, a friendly waitress interrupted us to tell us that Haruki Murakami (Wikipedia, Official site) had been sitting behind us throughout our conversation. She had asked him if he was “the writer,” and he nodded and asked her for her name. We couldn’t see him, since he had already left, but Mike told me that Murakami was a runner.  Mike and his wife Hiromi saw him running in the Boston Marathon a few years ago, and that Hiromi shouted, “Gambatte, Murakami Haruki!” as he ran by. Our short Grafton Street encounter ended this way as we parted to our divergent evening plans. I have been thinking about Murakami, because while I was on a trip to Mexico recently, I read The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, a magical-realism novel that impressed me with its uniqueness, so I have been thinking of reading more of Murakami, besides the two or three novels of his I have read. Sitting at the table next to “the writer” without knowing it, in a way, re-enacts the writer-reader relationship all along. I got a similar feeling when Javier Marias mentioned me in passing in a thank you note written to my friend Jeff Pretes a few years ago: “I cannot recall if I know your friend Alan Aspuru.” He indeed does not know me, but I have read all his novels. To close this loop, this week’s issue of The New Yorker includes an article by Murakami on how he started running and writing novels at the age of 33. Murakami writes at the end of his article,

At any rate, this is how I started running. Thirty-three— that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that F. Scott Fitzgerald started going downhill. It’s an age that may be a kind of crossroads in life. It was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.

I am 31, turning 32 in less than a month, and I feel as Murakami says he felt at 33. He talks about how he started running and that helped set the pace of his life. After being a bit sick in the last two weeks, my main personal priority is to start doing more exercise. I also feel that this is a moment when my science career is taking exciting turns day by day, as probably his career as a novelist did. Murakami talks about perseverance, a quality one needs to be successful in any field:

No matter how much long-distance running might suit me, of course there are days when I feel lethargic and don’t want to do it. On days like that, I try to come up with all kinds of plausible excuses not to run. Once, I interviewed the Olympic runner Toshihiko Seko, just after he had retired from running. I asked him, “Does a runner at your level ever feel like you’d rather not run today?”. He stared at me and then, in a voice that made it abundantly clear how stupid he thought the question was, replied, “Of course, All the time!”.

In my opinion, this feeling is universal and applies to science as well. Some days you don’t want to write a paper review, resubmit a paper, or write the next two pages of a grant proposal. But as the Olympic runner does, one needs discipline and self-motivation to move on. Gambatte!

I have been thinking of re-starting my blog for quite some time. Since I became an assistant professor, things have been quite hectic and exciting, and that led to abandoning my previous blog. I decided to remove my pre-2006 (graduate student-time) blog from the Internet, and begin afresh. This time around, I am going to be writing more sporadically and on more focused subjects.

Some of the areas that I want to write about range from science, science policy, politics, personal reflections and technology.