Physicists have performed the first full simulation of a high-energy physics experiment — the creation of pairs of particles and their antiparticles — on a quantum computer1. If the team can scale it up, the technique promises access to calculations that would be too complex for an ordinary computer to deal with.
To understand exactly what their theories predict, physicists routinely do computer simulations. They then compare the outcomes of the simulations with actual experimental data to test their theories.
In some situations, however, the calculations are too hard to allow predictions from first principles. This is particularly true for phenomena that involve the strong nuclear force, which governs how quarks bind together into protons and neutrons and how these particles form atomic nuclei, says Christine Muschik, a theoretical physicist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and a member of the simulation team.
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