Natalie Klco wins the 2026 Kenneth G. Wilson Award for Excellence in Lattice Field Theory The National Quantum Laboratory (QLab) is thrilled to congratulate Dr. Natalie Klco (Duke University) on receiving the prestigious 2026 Kenneth G. Wilson Award for Excellence in Lattice Field Theory. Sponsored by QLab, the award was announced during the 43rd International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2026). QLab Fellow and UMD physics professor Zohreh Davoudi, who chaired the organizing committee of the conference, had the distinct honor of presenting the award. Dr. Klco was recognized with the official award citation: "For pioneering contributions to digital quantum simulations of lattice gauge theories." A rising star in quantum physics Dr. Klco’s work sits at the cutting-edge intersection of quantum information science and nuclear physics. She has made contributions to understanding the entanglement structures of quantum fields. By developing physical representations and algorithms to map complex lattice gauge theories onto qubits and qutrits, she is guiding the practical implementation of dynamical quantum simulations on near-term quantum hardware. Her research includes several important milestones in the field:
- Simulating the Schwinger model: Dr. Klco developed a quantum-classical algorithm to compute the dynamics of the Schwinger model, successfully demonstrating that exploiting rotational symmetries and parity can significantly reduce the required number of qubits on IBM's quantum computers by removing unphysical sectors from the Hilbert space.
- Non-Abelian gauge theories: Pushing beyond simpler models, she helped formulate and implement the time evolution of an SU(2) gauge field theory on digital quantum hardware. By utilizing an angular momentum basis, her work allowed for the exploration of gauge field interactions with qubit requirements that scale linearly with spatial volume.
- Entanglement structures in the vacuum: Dr. Klco has advanced the...