As part of QDNL’s Visitor’s Programme, QuSoft welcomed researcher Nate Stemen in early 2026. During the exchange, Nate contributed to new algorithmic possibilities, mentored students at the University of Amsterdam, and completed software work in his areas of expertise.

Nate’s research work focused on speeding up a bottleneck in the quantum Fourier transform algorithm on the symmetric group. Using a numerical approach, he searched for patterns in compiled unitaries that might suggest smarter decomposition strategies. While better decompositions remain open, the team found several interesting properties that could inform future research. He also open-sourced a Python package for working with Young diagrams.

The second half of his time was largely devoted to mitiq, a Python toolkit for obtaining more accurate results on noisy quantum hardware. After six years of development, Nate shipped version 1.0, marking a major milestone and bringing the documentation up to date, squashing outstanding bugs, and modernising the project to align with current Python best practices.

“The release of mitiq version 1.0 represents a commitment to a stable API and signals that the project has matured into something the community can rely on even in a rapidly changing ecosystem,” adds Nate.

Beyond his research focus, Nate mentored a group of students at UvA. Together, they ran automated quantum error mitigation (QEM) experiments and built tooling to make it easier for other users to do the same, strengthening future experimentation.

“Having the opportunity to witness students develop both technical skills and intuition for a genuinely hard problem with significant engineering and mathematical trade-offs was a highlight of my time during the visit.”

Nate’s visit also offered further opportunities to contribute to the quantum community. He added new gates and features to the Quantum Gate Directory, collaborated with QuSoft colleagues on more efficient Toffoli decompositions, ran experiments with a Clifford tester, and wrote and published the second instalment of Nate’s Gates, a special zine series exploring quantum logic gates.

The QDNL Visitor’s Programme supports knowledge exchanges to foster collaboration and accelerate innovation across Europe’s growing quantum ecosystem.