Matthew J. Brandsema

With the significant expansion of renewable energy integration, the scale of the power grid also increases rapidly. To effectively monitor the operational state of large-scale power grids, optimizing the placement of Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) is a critical research focus. Optimizing PMU Placement (OPP) is a typical combinatorial optimization problem with NP-hard complexity, which brings substantial challenges to classical computers. The sheer scale of modern grids forces classical solvers into prohibitive runtimes and sub-optimal local minima, degrading both execution speed and solution quality. Recent advances in quantum computing have opened new opportunities for tackling combinatorial optimization problems, particularly through the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). However, QAOA operates as a hybrid quantum–classical framework, where determining the optimal parameters depends on a classical optimization process that remains computationally challenging and inherently NP-hard. On the other hand, in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, obtaining optimal optimization results typically requires a large number of quantum measurement shots. In this work, we propose a graph-learning-based strategy to provide QAOA with guided parameter initialization, enabling effective operation under limited quantum resources, particularly when the number of available measurement shots is restricted. Both the OPP problem and the channel-limitation task are investigated, where the proposed graph-learning-based parameter predictor enhances QAOA performance on both tasks, improving both the approximation ratio and computational efficiency. Furthermore, due to the complexity of the channel-limitation task and the scarcity of its pretraining data, a transfer learning strategy is employed to leverage knowledge from the original OPP task, where QAOA parameter datasets are more readily available to train the graph learning framework for the QAOA parameter predictor. The transfer learning approach also outperforms both random initialization and graph learning trained solely on the channel-limitation dataset in terms of the approximation ratio and the time efficiency. In general, this work is aimed at providing a new benchmark for solving complicated real-world power system optimization problems in the current NISQ era.

In this paper, the author investigates how non-stationary reference frames affect the observed trajectories of test particles, and how these observed effects might allow for the detection of gravitational waves. Most gravitational wave experiments rely on observing geometric oscillations of the spacetime between stationary test masses (with respect to each other). The results of this study indicate that an impinging gravitational wave, even of very weak amplitude, can cause much more noticeable effects between moving reference frames. The concepts herein are loosely analogous to how the properties of a magnetic field can be obtained from observing a charged particle’s cyclotron motion through it. To this end, the linearized geodesic differential equations are solved to obtain the coordinates of a particle along a path, and explicit trajectories are calculated for a wide range of gravitational wave parameters. It is found that the angular deviation in trajectory is dependent on the polarization state of the wave and amplitude, leading to the possibly of extracting these parameters from the deviation for real-world experiments. The approach here represents a first step and as such, there are many simplifying assumptions, which will be relaxed slowly over time in future work.

Mechanical antennas have garnered interest as a potential method of transmitting extremely low frequency (ELF) to very low frequency (VLF) radiation in a manner which possesses a high efficiency of radiation and a low form factor. In this paper, we investigate these claims by solving for the exact field solutions from one particular example, a rotational-oscillating charged thin spherical shell. The field solutions allow analysis of the radiation pattern, radiation efficiency, and spectral output as a function of several geometric and kinematic quantities of the sphere. The results indicate that high efficiency with a low formfactor appears to be plausible, assuming the required mechanical conditions for the motion can be achieved.