Quantum Computers Simulate Particle 'String Breaking' in a Physics Breakthrough
Subatomic particles such as quarks can pair up when linked by 'strings' of force fields — and release energy when the strings are pulled to the point of breaking. Two teams of physicists have now used quantum computers to mimic this phenomenon and watch it unfold in real time.
The results, described in two Nature papers on June 4, are the latest in a series of breakthroughs towards using quantum computers for simulations that are beyond the ability of any ordinary computers.
'String breaking is a very important process that is not yet fully understood from first principles,' says Christian Bauer, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, California. Physicists can calculate the final results of particle collisions that form or break strings using classical computers, but cannot fully simulate what happens in between. The success of the quantum simulations is 'incredibly encouraging,' Bauer says.
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String simulations
Each experiment was conducted by an international collaboration involving academic and industry researchers — one team at QuEra Computing, a start-up company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and another at the Google Quantum AI Lab in Santa Barbara, California.
The researchers using QuEra's Aquila machine encoded information in atoms that were arranged in a 2D honeycomb pattern, each suspended in place by an optical 'tweezer'. The quantum state of each atom — a qubit that could be excited or relaxed — represented the electric field at a point in space, explains co-author Daniel González-Cuadra, a theoretical physicist now at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid. In the other experiment, researchers encoded the 2D quantum field in the states of superconducting loops on Google's Sycamore chip.
The teams used diametrically opposite quantum-simulation philosophies. The atoms in Aquila were arranged so that the electrostatic forces between them mimicked the behaviour of the electric field, and continuously evolved towards their own states of lower energy — an approach called analogue quantum simulation. The Google machine was instead used as a 'digital' quantum simulator: the superconducting loops were made to follow the evolution of the quantum field 'by hand', through a discrete sequence of manipulations.
In both cases, the teams set up strings in the field that effectively acted like rubber bands connecting two particles. Depending on how the researchers tuned the parameters, the strings could be stiff or wobbly, or could break up. 'In some cases, the whole string just dissolves: the particles become deconfined,' says Frank Pollmann, a physicist at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Garching, Germany, who helped to lead the Google experiment.
Fast progress
Although simulating strings in a 2D electric field could have applications for studying the physics of materials, it is still a long way from fully simulating high-energy interactions, such as those that occur in particle colliders, which are in 3D and involve the much more complex strong nuclear force. 'We do not have a clear path at this point how to get there,' says Monika Aidelsburger, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Munich, Germany.
Still, the latest results are exciting, and progress in quantum simulation in general has been 'really amazing and very fast,' Aidelsburger says.
Last year, Bauer and his LBNL colleague Anthony Ciavarella were among the first teams to simulate the strong nuclear force on a quantum computer. Approaches that replace qubits with qudits — which can have more than two quantum states and can be more realistic representations of a quantum field — could also make simulations more powerful, researchers say.
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