The macroscopic realm, which consists of everything from falling balls to orbiting planets, can be explained by the laws of classical mechanics. When nature reaches the smallest scales, however, stranger, quantum rules kick in. Here, particles begin to exhibit bizarre properties: They do not have definite positions, and they can remain connected across vast distances and be altered by observation alone. To truly comprehend how the universe works, scientists need to be able to tap into this quantum realm.
One of the first to propose this idea was physicist Richard Feynman, who, in a now-famous 1981 lecture, stated that to understand the universe, scientists would need to use a quantum simulator. “Nature isn’t classical—and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical,” Feynman said. “And by golly it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn’t look so easy.”
The problem has, indeed, proven to be difficult: A quantum computer capable of simulating high-energy physics phenomena has yet to be developed. But over the last few decades, scientists have managed to build simulators that can touch on physics problems of the quantum realm.
“It’s quite an exciting field at the moment,” says Zohreh Davoudi, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland. “Several groups are pushing to reach the milestones that we have set in enabling truly quantum simulations of nature.”
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