Quantum simulator (nonfiction)

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Quantum simulators permit the study of quantum systems that are difficult to study in the laboratory and impossible to model with a supercomputer. In this instance, simulators are special purpose devices designed to provide insight about specific physics problems.

A universal quantum simulator is a quantum computer proposed by Richard Feynman in 1982. Feynman showed that a classical Turing machine would experience an exponential slowdown when simulating quantum phenomena, while his hypothetical universal quantum simulator would not. David Deutsch in 1985, took the ideas further and described a universal quantum computer. In 1996, Seth Lloyd showed that a standard quantum computer can be programmed to simulate any local quantum system efficiently.

A quantum system of many particles is described by a Hilbert space whose dimension is exponentially large in the number of particles. Therefore, the obvious approach to simulate such a system requires exponential time on a classical computer. However, it is conceivable that a quantum system of many particles could be simulated by a quantum computer using a number of quantum bits similar to the number of particles in the original system. As shown by Lloyd, this is true for a class of quantum systems known as local quantum systems. This has been extended to much larger classes of quantum systems.

Quantum simulators have been realized on a number of experimental platforms, including systems of ultracold quantum gases, trapped ions, photonic systems and superconducting circuits.

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