Quantum technologies promise powerful new kinds of computers, giving scientists new tools to mimic and explore nature at its tiniest scales. At those levels, everything in nature—from atoms and electrons to light itself—follows the strange rules of quantum mechanics. But the real world is never perfectly clean: Signals fade, energy leaks away and systems pick up noise from their surroundings.
"Understanding how quantum systems behave under this messiness is crucial if we want our experiments to say something about nature as it really is, not just idealized setups," says Govind Krishna, Ph.D. student at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
In a recent study at KTH, Krishna led the development of a chip that enables researchers to simulate the way many quantum systems behave when they lose energy or information to their surroundings. The results were published in Nature Communications.
"Imprerfections" matter.
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