Chris Heunen

@chrisheunen.bsky.social

computer scientist, mathematician, father, karateka, pianist

We're hiring! Two postdoc posts in the Quantum Software Lab at Edinburgh to develop foundations and tools for hybrid quantum-classical programming. Use categorical semantics to give quantum programs meaning, and turn that into compilers and optimisations: elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Research Associate

The successful candidate will work on the RubberDUQ project within the Quantum Software Lab, developing mathematical foundations and practical tools for hybrid quantum-classical programming. The proje...

elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com

Coverages, or Grothendieck topologies, describe when a collection of regions covers another region in a space. But what if your space is a spacetime? The topological space may have a causal order saying which (spacetime) points 'come before' which other points, for example.

Illustration of causal coverage: region U is covered by regions A because any path that ends in U must pass through A.

A new quantum programming construct: more abstract than circuits, capturing important examples elegantly and in fact universal, yet simple and intuitive. With prototype compiler and clean categorical semantics to boot! With Alex Rice, Chris McNally, and Louis Lemonnier: arxiv.org/abs/2507.11676

Quantum circuits are just a phase

Quantum programs today are written at a low level of abstraction - quantum circuits akin to assembly languages - and even advanced quantum programming languages essentially function as circuit descrip...

arxiv.org

I presented a taster poster on our upcoming work in distributed quantum compilation at the Uni of Edinburgh’s Informatics internal research showcase this Tuesday. Focus: our upcoming model/hardware-agnostic intermediate representation for compilation of quantum programs (quite a mouthful I know!)

Bild

🚨 New preprint alert 🚨 Always wanted to know the connection between analytic limits and categorical limits? Tired of having to establish directed colimits of contractions when directed colimits of isometries suffice? You're in luck! Now on www.arxiv.org/abs/2505.17432. With Matt Di Meglio.

M*-categories: Where limits in analysis and category theory meet

This article introduces M*-categories: an abstraction of categories with similar algebraic and analytic properties to the categories of real, complex, and quaternionic Hilbert spaces and bounded linea...

arxiv.org