Congratulations to Professor Martin Savage for winning the 2026 Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics from the American Physical Society for “For pioneering contributions to computational quantum chromodynamics for nuclear physics, especially through large-scale lattice quantum chromodynamics simulations, and for exploring applications of quantum computing.”
Martin feels honored to be receiving the Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics from the APS for advancing research into the properties and dynamics of strongly interacting matter composed of quarks and gluons using large scale computer simulations, and for leading the development of simulations using quantum computers. This research, which supports and complements a vibrant experimental program, is key to understanding and predicting the dynamics of matter under extreme conditions, and low-energy and high-energy nuclear reactions, as occur in supernovae, neutron stars and reactors. It is also central to gaining insights into the uniqueness of our universe, as well as the interplay with, and the deep role of, quantum information.
In the mid 1990’s, he joined UW’s internationally renowned nuclear physics effort, which includes a Nuclear Theory group (NTG), the National Institute for Nuclear Theory (INT), and the Center for Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics (CENPA). Initially he focused on developing effective field theory tools, based upon the symmetries of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and the Standard Model of Particle Physics, for addressing these challenges, collaborating with UW faculty David Kaplan and Silas Beane, Mark Wise (Caltech), and others. In the early 2000’s, while on sabbatical leave at MIT and Caltech, he co-founded the Nuclear Physics with Lattice QCD (NPLQCD) collaboration, with Silas Beane, Paulo Bedaque (U. of Maryland, was a Postdoc and Research Assistant Professor at INT), Kostas Orginos (William and Mary) and Assumpta Parreno (U of Barcelona, was a Postdoc at INT), to use the largest supercomputers to solve QCD. Part of that effort involved a collaboration with David Kaplan and Chance Reschke (UW Astronomy) to establish a high-performance computer at UW. Starting by installing the NTGs parallel clusters Deuteronomy and Tiger in Physics (with Aurel Bulgac and Jerry Miller), a NSF MRI grant (with Kaplan and Reschke) funded the installation of the Tera-flop computer Athena (located in CENPA, used by Physics and Astronomy (including LSST database development led by UWs Andy Connelly)), which led to HYAK, the campus-wide high-performance computing facility at UW. The success of NPLQCD was ``built on the shoulders’’ of earlier efforts in lattice QCD, particularly the effort led by John Negele at MIT (the LHPC collaboration), and by the effort at Jefferson Laboratory, which were both part of the national USQCD effort that guided and supported the US effort in particle and nuclear physics. USQCD was very supportive of the NPLQCD effort from the beginning, and NPLQCD continues to advance first-principles calculations of the structure and reactions of matter.
Co-leading the push into Exascale computing more than ten years ago (co-chairing two community-wide reports), it became clear to Martin that some of the critical objectives in the study of fundamental physics cannot be reached with classical computing alone, and that quantum computing and quantum information was key to the path forward, as outlined decades earlier by Feynman and others. Soon after, Martin co-chaired the first report on quantum computing for nuclear theory (the output from an INT workshop) in 2018, and chaired the sub-committee report on quantum information for nuclear physics for the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee in 2019.
Martin feels an enormous gratitude to his colleagues and collaborators for an environment that embraces new and creative big ideas, and their ``can do’’ attitude. Without their trust and support, many of the ``overly ambitious ideas’’ that had a high probability of failure would not have been pursued, and which ultimately led to something new and interesting. Martin says that the INT plays a unique role in shaping modern fundamental physics, and has been instrumental in bringing together new ideas, technologies and people to accelerate research in priority areas.
Since 2020, he has been the PI of the InQubator for Quantum Simulation (IQuS) in Physics at the UW, focused at the interface of quantum information, quantum computing and fundamental physics, and has been active in the Quantum Science Center (QSC, a National Quantum Initiative Center). IQuS activities include local research, visitors, and international ``think tanks’’ hosted by the INT, which bring about 20 researchers together for two-week strategic activities. IQuS is also the home of the UW’s student Quantum Computing Club. Of the many contributions to this rapidly advancing area of research, one of Martin’s significant works, with Roland Farrell (NTG+IQuS PhD student, now at Caltech), Marc Illa (IQuS+QSC Postdoc, now at PNNL) and Anthony Ciavarella (INT+IQuS PhD student, now at LBNL), developed scalable circuits for quantum simulations of confining lattice field theories, which they used to perform the largest quantum simulations to date (2023-2024) using more than 100 qubits on IBMs quantum computers. He recently co-led the UW-IonQ co-design effort to perform pathfinding simulations of rare nuclear decay processes using IonQ’s trapped-ion quantum computers. With recent demonstrations of logical qubits and error correction, integrating fault-tolerance and error correction into quantum simulation of fundamental physics and making connections with experimental observables, along with improved understanding of the role of quantum complexity, is Martin’s near-term focus.