Quantum Computations on Fusion Blanket Molten Salts
Authors:
Susanta Das,
Thiago J. Pinheiro Dos Santos,
Subhamoy Bhowmik,
Milana Bazayeva,
Zhen Li,
Akhil Shajan,
Danil Kaliakin,
Fangchun Liang,
Vyacheslav S. Bryantsev,
Al Geist,
Abigail McClain Gomez,
Thaddeus Pellegrini,
Robert Walkup,
Seetharami R. Seelam,
Mario Motta,
Kenneth M. Merz, Jr.,
Thomas Beck
Abstract:
Molten salts such as FLiBe (2LiF--BeF$_2$) are leading blanket materials for breeding and recovering tritium in fusion reactors. Predicting tritium speciation requires accurate electronic ground-state energies for representative molten-salt clusters, a demanding task for correlated electronic-structure methods. Here we report the first application of heterogeneous quantum--classical computing to t…
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Molten salts such as FLiBe (2LiF--BeF$_2$) are leading blanket materials for breeding and recovering tritium in fusion reactors. Predicting tritium speciation requires accurate electronic ground-state energies for representative molten-salt clusters, a demanding task for correlated electronic-structure methods. Here we report the first application of heterogeneous quantum--classical computing to tritium binding in FLiBe. Clusters drawn from ab initio molecular dynamics are partitioned by an embedded-wavefunction (EWF) method into atom-centered fragments, and the largest fragments are solved on IBM quantum hardware using extended sample-based quantum diagonalization (ext-SQD). Across nine clusters, the heterogeneous quantum--classical workflow reproduces fragment ground-state energies with agreement to full configuration interaction within 0.7~kcal/mol and a mean absolute deviation of 0.3~kcal/mol. In contrast, fragmented and unfragmented conformational energy differences and tritium binding energies differ by 12~kcal/mol and 110~kcal/mol on average, respectively, identifying fragment construction rather than fragment solution as the dominant source of algorithmic bias. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such demonstration for a charged ionic system and in particular an inorganic molten salt, where electrostatic and polarization effects make the accurate treatment of electronic correlation particularly challenging. These results also identify areas of future research towards an accurate and scalable quantum--classical workflow to compute free-energy estimates of tritium speciation in fusion blankets.
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Submitted 29 June, 2026;
originally announced June 2026.
Spaceflight KID Readout Electronics for PRIMA
Authors:
Thomas Essinger-Hileman,
C. Matt Bradford,
Patrick Brown,
Sean Bryan,
Jesse Coldsmith,
Jennifer Corekin,
Sumit Dahal,
Thomas Devlin,
Marc Foote,
Draisy Friedman,
Alessandro Geist,
Jason Glenn,
Christopher Green,
Tracee Jamison-Hooks,
Kevin Horgan,
Jared Lucey,
Philip Mauskopf,
Lynn Miles,
Sanetra Bailey Newman,
Gerard Quilligan,
Cody Roberson,
Adrian Sinclair,
Salman Sheikh,
Eric Weeks,
Christopher Wilson
, et al. (1 additional authors not shown)
Abstract:
We present the design and testing of a prototype multiplexing kinetic inductance detector (KID) readout electronics for the PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics (PRIMA) space mission. PRIMA is a Probe-class astrophysics mission concept that will answer fundamental questions about the formation of planetary systems, the co-evolution of stars and supermassive black holes in galaxies, and the…
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We present the design and testing of a prototype multiplexing kinetic inductance detector (KID) readout electronics for the PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics (PRIMA) space mission. PRIMA is a Probe-class astrophysics mission concept that will answer fundamental questions about the formation of planetary systems, the co-evolution of stars and supermassive black holes in galaxies, and the rise of heavy elements and dust over cosmic time. The readout electronics for PRIMA must be compatible with operation at Earth-Sun L2 and capable of multiplexing more than 1000 detectors over 2.5 GHz bandwidth while consuming around 30 W per readout chain. The electronics must also be capable of switching between the two instruments, which have different readout bands: the hyperspectral imager (PRIMAger, 2.6-4.9 GHz) and the spectrometer (FIRESS, 0.4-2.4 GHz). The PRIMA readout electronics use high-heritage SpaceCube digital electronics with a build-to-print SpaceCube Mini v3.0 board using a radiation-tolerant Kintex KU060 field programmable gate array (FPGA) and a custom high-speed digitizer board, along with RF electronics that provide filtering and power conditioning. We present the driving requirements for the system, as well as the hardware, firmware, software, and system-level design that meets those requirements.
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Submitted 6 January, 2026; v1 submitted 4 December, 2025;
originally announced December 2025.