By: Niki Tavakoli ‘27
Michael May ‘11 is a physicist currently working at the Plasma Physics Program in Princeton. He specializes in the use of quantum computers to simulate plasma behavior, and is currently working on a project aimed at rewriting fundamental equations in order to make quantum computer simulations of plasma more accurate in the hopes that they’d be an alternative to our current solutions.
May joined Andover as a new upper from a rural town. Though he wasn’t able to take many higher-level math classes, he did take the Physics 400 sequence. However, it wasn’t until college that physics truly began to interest him. May elaborated further on his physics journey.
“I was not particularly excited by [Physics 400], but I guess I was hoping that when I went to college that [Physics] would become more interesting, and very slowly it did. I majored in physics and religion in undergraduate, and decided to do a one year masters at the University of Edinburgh after in physics. I was then a high school physics teacher for a year in the South Bronx and after that I came to [the] plasma physics program at Princeton,” said May.
Plasma physics focuses on the movements of plasma. Plasma, often called “the fourth state of matter”, is matter so hot that the electrons are ripped away from the atoms, forming an ionized gas. It is a state of matter that most of the universe exists in, including stars and other interstellar mediums. What interests May is that plasma moves in complicated ways, but also has a very simple set of defining equations. May also elaborated further on how people don’t do many experiments with plasma, but there is potential to explore the topic further.
“The kind of things that people are looking for at CERN are usually not the kinds of things that theorists spend their days thinking about. … There’s [also] people that study gravity and cosmology and there’s just not a lot of experiments on Earth that you can do with those things, but there’s still a lot of fundamental physics that people know very little about with plasmas. Interestingly, there’s still [relatively simple] experiments that people have yet to do to test those ideas. We don’t need to build LIGO or CERN or something like that,” said May.
May’s most recent research is on using quantum computers to run simulations of plasma. Even the largest computers on earth still can only run reduced simulations of plasma. Currently, the leading idea for nuclear fusion is a tokamak, a donut-shaped device with spiraling magnetic fields which confine and heat up plasma in order to fuse hydrogen atoms. However, these are very expensive to build, and more accurate simulations would reduce the need to build such tokamaks. May elaborated further on the potential applications of quantum computers.
“There’s this hope that with quantum computing that we’ll be able to ask questions about plasmas that we previously were only able to explore experimentally because [the simulations] are too complicated to run on the classical computer. …[But] whether or not plasma physics questions are the right kinds of questions you need to be asking a quantum computer, it’s kind of the Wild West right now in terms of whether or not that’s possible,” said May.
May is one of the many people working on improving computer simulations of plasma physics, with the end goal of turning nuclear fusion into a viable source of energy. There are many ways people are approaching this problem, from trying to find alternative ways to perform computations to utilizing quantum computers to speed up these calculations. May’s current work involves trying to rewrite the Vlasov-Maxwell system of equations, the fundamental plasma physics equations, to optimize it for use in quantum computers.
“The Vlasov equation … just comes from Newtonian mechanics. The Maxwell equations tell you about how electromagnetic waves propagate and how charges influence each other. … It’d be nice if we were able to rewrite [this] system in such a way that it would be ready-made to work on a quantum computer. I’m looking at different ways to rewrite these equations to see if they work better on a quantum computer than on a classical computer … I see myself as in this broad category of people that are trying to find different ways to make plasma physics simulations more viable,” said May.
Quantum computing and plasma physics are both on the edge of new developments. May is particularly excited about a new tokamak, the ITER, being built in the south of France as a collaborative effort by multiple countries. It is scheduled to open in the next couple of years, and is hoping to release more energy through nuclear fusion than is put into the system to trigger the fusion–it will be the first large-scale example of a net gain in energy through nuclear fusion. However, May also noted that private fusion ventures are becoming increasingly more common.
“Increasingly, in the United States a lot of private industries that are interested in fusion and they’re coming at it in very very different ways… a lot of these private fusion ventures are asking questions about how we can make fusion reactors smaller and more modular from the outset. … So these private companies are looking at ideas for a smaller kind of reactor that would be built much much cheaper. I’m most looking forward to seeing which of these private fusion ideas, or if any of them, end up producing the results that they claim to be able to in the very short term. That would be really exciting not only for my research but also for the world and the world energy market,” said May.
