Imagine zooming into matter at the quantum scale, where tiny particles can interact in more than a trillion configurations at once.
If that sounds complicated, it is: Physicists often rely on supercomputers or even artificial intelligence to simulate such quantum systems and their possible states.
But what if many of these problems could instead be solved on an ordinary laptop?
The physics community has known this to be possible for years but making it a reality has been more complicated.
Now, physicists at the University at Buffalo have moved us much closer. They've extended a computationally affordable method known as the truncated Wigner approximation (TWA)—a sort of physics shortcut that makes quantum math more manageable—to problems once thought to require massive computing power.
Equally important, the approach, described in a study published in September in PRX Quantum, also provides a practical, user-friendly TWA template that allows physicists to plug in their problem and get usable results in hours.
"Our approach offers a significantly lower computational cost and a much simpler formulation of the dynamical equations," says the study's corresponding author, Jamir Marino, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. "We think this method could, in the near future, become the primary tool for exploring these kinds of quantum dynamics on consumer-grade computers."
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