My first year as a PhD student (2020)

[@hevidu4896]

Happy new year! Looking forward to your video series.

[@leqr3734]

Happy new year, looking forward to that Black-Scholes PDE video !

[@ivieporto]

Hey! You could do more videos about PhD life at Oslo

[@JonathonRiddell]

Great video! Did you interview anyone from Canada? In my undergraduate degree we had a somewhat sparse amount of professors looking to integrate coding into our courses and to be honest, before my first dedicated course on coding, I found these portions of the courses really confusing. Where I went to the school the first big (dedicated) exposure to coding takes place in third year for Physics students, which seems a bit late. I definitely owe my computational side to the Math department for my undergraduate degree.

[@pragatigupta5961]

Hi Greg! Thank you for the video. Yesterday only I gave my PhD interview in the department of clinical and cognitive neuroscience(university of Oslo). Just wanted to know, if you have any idea by when the results are out, approximately

[@GregWintherArtist]

Sorry for the very belated reply - hopefully you got your answer by now? I had nothing to do with the process..

[@PratimMukherjee]

Love from India 🇮🇳

[@a1ang0r85]

Hello Greg, your videos are interesting and inspiring. I want to study quantum computing and quantum machine learning, like IBM Cloud or Xanadu. Should I choose to specialize in computational physics or quantum physics as an option?

[@GregWintherArtist]

You have to use computational/numerical methods in order to do any any sort of useful computations in quantum physics (i.e. you would be doing both). You are only able to study the simplest (uninteresting) systems using analytic methods. I don't know the details of your specialisation choices, but look into what sort of applications your computational physics specialisation has. You should make sure to take courses on advanced many-body theory (sometimes called quantum chemistry or physical chemistry). I can recommend Piotr Piecuch's lectures - search for CHEM580 on KZbin.

[@a1ang0r85]

@@GregWintherArtist Do you mean if I choose the track of quantum physics I can only choose some uninteresting topics in computational physics due to nowadays limitation in quantum computing power? I am now going to research the quantum tensor network with other people. I indeed need the concepts of quantum many body system, thank you for your advice.

[@GregWintherArtist]

No. Think of it this way; computational physics is a toolbox that allows you to study other fields/topics like quantum physics. The answer to your original question "Should I choose to specialise in computational physics or quantum physics (...)?" is yes. You absolutely need quantum theory to be able to understand the theory behind quantum computers, and you absolutely need computational tools to be able to make any sort of useful computation/calculation. IBM Cloud and Xanadu are other tools that might be useful if you want to do quantum information theory - develop algorithms and the like. Another challenge that I think is important to tackle is finding candidates for qubit systems that are more easy to manage than the ones we have now (the main obstacle is decoherence). I am currently co-supervising a masters student who is using ML to search through large datasets of materials to this end.

[@MrSteini124]

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