Quantum computers, enthusiasts forecast, will one day work no end of miracles — from breaking digital encryptions to designing wonder drugs. At this early stage, however, the advantage of many quantum algorithms remains speculative. And some researchers wonder whether wielding the necessary control at the subatomic level is even possible. “It’s a very daunting goal,” said Markus Greiner, a physicist at Harvard University.
Yet even without full-blown quantum computers, physicists are using related, more specialized types of machines — quantum simulators — to realize one of the initial aims of the field: to emulate the byzantine behavior of quantum systems.
As Richard Feynman put it in a 1981 lecture, “Nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical.”
Over the past few years, groups in Paris and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have made great progress to this end using a dark-horse type of quantum simulator. They have made a series of simulations that would take months or more to replicate on a classical computer.
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