World’s Fastest Quantum Simulator Developed

Scientists have develop the world’s fastest simulator that can simulate quantum mechanical dynamics of a large number of particles interacting with each other within one billionths of a second.

The dynamics of many electrons interacting with each other governs a variety of important physical and chemical phenomena such as superconductivity, magnetism, and chemical reactions.

An ensemble of many particles thus interacting with each other is referred to as a “strongly correlated system.”

Understanding the properties of strongly correlated systems is thus one of the central goals of modern sciences. It is extremely difficult, however, to predict theoretically the properties of a strongly correlated system even if one uses the post-K supercomputer, which is one of the world’s fastest supercomputers planned to be completed by the year 2020 in a national project of Japan.

Kenji Ohmori (Institute for Molecular Science, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, Japan) has collaborated with Matthias Weidemüller (University of Heidelberg), Guido Pupillo (University of Strasbourg), Claudiu Genes (University of Innsbruck) and their coworkers to develop this project.

The team has developed a completely new quantum simulator that can simulate the dynamics of a strongly correlated system of more than 40 atoms within one billionths of a second.

This “ultrafast quantum simulator” is expected to serve as a basic tool to investigate the origin of physical properties of matter including magnetism and, possibly, superconductivity.