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An international group of physicists has created a revolutionary quantum algorithm for modeling particle scattering, a process that underlies everything from billiard ball collisions to nuclear reactions in starsThe study, published in the journal Physical Review C, opens new horizons in understanding fundamental interactions in the universe.
Scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the InQubator for Quantum Simulations, and the University of Trento focused on what's known as nonrelativistic elastic scattering. This phenomenon occurs when an object traveling much slower than the speed of light bounces off a target without losing any energy. The problem is that with each additional particle, the computational complexity increases exponentially, making such problems virtually intractable for conventional computers.
"Quantum computers are ideally suited to tracking the evolution of a two-object system over time", explains Sofia Quaglioni of the Livermore Laboratory. Her colleague Kyle Wendt provides a striking illustration of the problem: "To simulate nuclear processes during the explosion of stars on a classical supercomputer, we would need a machine the size of the Moon".
The developed algorithm works on the principle of gradually reproducing the interaction process, starting with the analysis of the initial position of the particles. The key innovation is the use of a special detector and the "variational trick" method, which allows you to accurately determine the phase changes of quantum waves during the collision. In quantum mechanics, it is these phase shifts that carry the most important information about the nature of the interaction.
The researchers first tested the algorithm on classical computers and then successfully ran it on IBM quantum processors. Two properties of the new method proved to be particularly valuable: its resistance to errors that arise in quantum systems, and its scalability to model more complex interactions that are beyond the reach of even the most powerful modern supercomputers..
Although the algorithm has only been tested on the simplest model of two-particle interactions, its potential for science is enormous. In the future, this technology could help decipher complex processes inside stars, explain the formation of heavy elements in space, and open up a new level of understanding of the fundamental laws that govern the universe at the quantum level.
An international group of physicists has created a revolutionary quantum algorithm for modeling particle scattering, a process that underlies everything from billiard ball collisions to nuclear reactions in starsThe study, published in the journal Physical Review C, opens new horizons in understanding fundamental interactions in the universe.
Scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the InQubator for Quantum Simulations, and the University of Trento focused on what's known as nonrelativistic elastic scattering. This phenomenon occurs when an object traveling much slower than the speed of light bounces off a target without losing any energy. The problem is that with each additional particle, the computational complexity increases exponentially, making such problems virtually intractable for conventional computers.
"Quantum computers are ideally suited to tracking the evolution of a two-object system over time", explains Sofia Quaglioni of the Livermore Laboratory. Her colleague Kyle Wendt provides a striking illustration of the problem: "To simulate nuclear processes during the explosion of stars on a classical supercomputer, we would need a machine the size of the Moon".
The developed algorithm works on the principle of gradually reproducing the interaction process, starting with the analysis of the initial position of the particles. The key innovation is the use of a special detector and the "variational trick" method, which allows you to accurately determine the phase changes of quantum waves during the collision. In quantum mechanics, it is these phase shifts that carry the most important information about the nature of the interaction.
The researchers first tested the algorithm on classical computers and then successfully ran it on IBM quantum processors. Two properties of the new method proved to be particularly valuable: its resistance to errors that arise in quantum systems, and its scalability to model more complex interactions that are beyond the reach of even the most powerful modern supercomputers..
Although the algorithm has only been tested on the simplest model of two-particle interactions, its potential for science is enormous. In the future, this technology could help decipher complex processes inside stars, explain the formation of heavy elements in space, and open up a new level of understanding of the fundamental laws that govern the universe at the quantum level.
