In July 2025 I joined team Superposition Impossible at the NQCC UK Quantum Hackathon in Edinburgh. We worked the Rolls-Royce challenge: VQE and sample-based quantum diagonalisation for hydrogen on nickel, with notes on circuit depth for NISQ hardware.
Fig. 1The sample-based quantum diagonalisation pipeline used by the team. Animated schematic with illustrative bitstrings and energy levels. The closing −2.15 eV is not recorded in the team’s repository; the −2.2 eV DFT reference is a literature value its script compares against.
