Mark Mitchison

@mitchison.bsky.social

369 Followers 553 Following

Theory of Controlled Quantum Systems | @royalsociety.org University Research Fellow @ King’s College London | Editor @quantum-journal.bsky.social & New Journal of Physics | He/him | posts ≈ 60% science/30% politics/11% nonsense

Chicken mappas (a kind of curry) and appam (a fluffy rice-based savoury pancake)
A picture of 9 people who contributed to making Quantum Quest, standing in front of a large poster with AMBER written on it, and including the cartoon characters Alice, Bob and Cat.
A picture showing a quantum clock (left) driven by a thermal gradient, whose ticks are transitions between microscopic quantum states. Reading out these transitions requires an active tick sensor, which produces a large amount of entropy per tick of the clock.
Diagram of our system: a driven qubit coupled to a collective environment mode (the reaction coordinate).
Kavan Modi standing in front of a projector slide titled Quantum Process Tomography
Dr Shane Dooley standing on the stage, next to the first slide of his talk titled “Remote quantum sensing through a thermal Floquet spin chain”
Illustration of the three-way trade off between dark count rate (top), detection time uncertainty (jitter, bottom left) and dead time (bottom right). These cannot all be simultaneously improved, but must be traded off against one another, if the detector’s rate of steady-state entropy production (centre) is fixed.
Picture of the metro map of Singapore
Mark on stage giving a talk at QTD 2025. The slide motivates why the audience of quantum thermodynamics researchers should be interested in clocks.
A diagram showing a tensor network state, evolved in time by a unitary operator, followed by an expectation value of the heat operator (raised to the nth power). This yields the nth statistical moment of the heat distribution.
Selfie of me standing in front of the entrance to King’s College London Strand campus
Picture of me holding a thesis titled “Thermodynamics of Nanoelectromechanics”
Simon Sundelin speaking at a podium at APS
Plots of the clock's precision as a function of entropy produced by generating ticks (left) and entropy produced by measuring and amplifying the ticks (right). The latter is some 9-10 orders of magnitude larger than the former.
Depiction of the quantum-classical transition in a microscopic clock. A quantum clock transitions between three discrete states, driven by thermal noise. These transitions are amplified by a sensor into a classical signal, which can be shared among classical observers as an objective record of the passage of time.
Diagram of our new neural network architecture for measurement based quantum feedback control
A picture of me standing in front of a modern abstract painting