Email: hkawai@ucsb.edu
Department of Physics, Santa Barbara, CA (September 2021 - Present)
Master of Arts in Physics, currently a candidate for Doctoral degree in Physics
College of Arts and Science and College of Engineering, Boston, MA (September 2016 - May 2021)
Bachelor of Arts in Physics and Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering
Hyogo, Japan (April 2013 - March 2016)
Graduate Student Researcher, Santa Barbara, CA (2021 - Present)
Working with Professor David Berenstein in high energy physics theory. Research focuses on gauge theories, particle physics, and connections to string and gravity theory. Preprint available on arXiv, with other publications in preparation. I am also working with Adolfo Holguin from Trinity College Dublin on supersymmetric gauge theories. Some part of the work is available on arXiv as well.
Teaching Assistant, Santa Barbara, CA (2021 - Present)
Assisting in physics classes, helping students understand course material and improve problem-solving skills during discussion sections and office hours.
Visiting Researcher, Kyoto, Japan (Summer 2021, Summer 2024)
Conducted research under the "Atom-type Researcher" program in 2024.
Undergraduate Research Assistant, Boston, MA (2019 - 2021)
Studied digitization of lattice gauge theories to develop quantum algorithms for simulation. Results published in Physical Review D and a proceeding.
Research Internship, Tokyo, Japan (Summer 2019)
Developed a classical-quantum hybrid machine learning framework to predict excited-state properties of molecular Hamiltonians. The work is published on Machine Learning: Science and Technology.
Undergraduate Research Assistant, Boston, MA (2018 - 2019)
Worked on privacy protection for image/video data using machine learning at the Visual Image Processing Laboratory. Published in 2019 IEEE 29th International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP).
August 5-9, 2024, Kyoto, Japan, Poster (in Japanese)
July 17, 2024, Saitama, Japan, Talk
July 31 - August 4, 2023, Batavia, Illinois, USA, Talk
Title: "Confining Strings as Integrable Spin Chains in Large N Lattice Yang-Mills Theory"
April 12-16, 2021, Online, Poster
Title: "U(1) link dynamics from gauged fermions towards quantum computing"
January 5-8, 2021, Online, Invited talk
Title: "Quantum Links for U(1) Gauge Theory on Qubits and Its Simulation with Digital Quantum Circuit"
November 9-12, 2020, Online, Poster
Title: "Predicting excited states from ground state wavefunction by supervised quantum machine learning"
August 4-7, 2020, Online, Talk
Title: "Quantum Links for U(1) Gauge Theory on Qubits and Reduction to Z2 Gauge Theory and Toric Code"
July 7-8, 2020, Online, Talk
Title: "Quantum Links for U(1) Gauge Theory on Qubits and Reduction to Z2 Gauge Theory and Toric Code"
October 13-16, 2019, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, Poster
Title: "VAE/WGAN-Based Image Representation Learning for Pose-Preserving Seamless Identity Replacement in Facial Images"
22nd Simons Physics Summer Workshop: Future pathways for fundamental physics
July 31-August 8, 2025, Stony Brook, New York, USA
Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, Boston University - 2025
Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship, UCSB - Fall 2025 quarter
College Prize for Excellence in Physics, Boston University - 2021, upon graduation.
Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), Boston University - Summer 2018, Fall 2018, and Spring 2019 for the work.
Summer Term Alumni Research Scholars (STARS), Boston University - Partial support as an undergraduate researcher in Summer 2018.
UROP Travel Award, Boston University - For the poster presentation at MLSP 2019.
Verbal languages: Japanese, English
Programming languages: C, C++, Python, Julia, Mathematica, MATLAB, and some other languages with small experiences
[1] D. Berenstein and H. Kawai. Integrable Spin Chains from large-N QCD at strong coupling. 8 2023.
[2] D. Berenstein, H. Kawai, and R. Brower. U(1) fields from qubits: An approach via D-theory algebra. Phys. Rev. D, 110(1):014506, 2024.
[3] R. C. Brower, D. Berenstein, and H. Kawai. Lattice Gauge Theory for a Quantum Computer. PoS, LATTICE2019:112, 2020.
[4] A. Holguin and H. Kawai. Integrability and Conformal Blocks for Surface Defects in N = 4 SYM. 3 2025.
[5] H. Kawai, J. Chen, P. Ishwar, and J. Konrad. Vae/wgan-based image representation learning for pose-preserving seamless identity replacement in facial images. pages 1-6, 2019.
[6] H. Kawai and Y. O. Nakagawa. Predicting excited states from ground state wavefunction by supervised quantum machine learning. Machine Learning: Science and Technology, 2020.
Also see Inspire HEP