![]() I will now give you a brief idea of what is done with these machines to gain insights in otherwise unsolvable problems. For example, I want to make them more efficient and develop new concepts for learning as much as possible from the large amount of generated experimental data. My work is concerned with improving these quantum simulators. Already in the 80’s he pointed out that quantum simulators (he did not use that name at this time) would incorporate quantum mechanics naturally as the building blocks themselves are quantum. The ideas for that go back to the famous physicist Richard Feynman. Since a decade, experimental physicists aim to simulate quantum mechanics involving many particles with newly developed machines - so-called quantum simulators. To understand the consequences of quantum mechanical effects in complicated materials like superconducting devices or in our observable universe, one has to use approaches different from brute-force computations using the understanding of small systems. In nature we typically find systems that are made up of many particles. Nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it’s a wonderful problem, because it doesn’t look so easy. This means that the complexity for twice as many particles does not double but grows super-fast - it quickly becomes impossible to simulate these problems even on the largest computers. Transferring our understanding to these situations is hard it is actually exponentially hard. These particles can be for example electrons, nuclei or atoms. One speaks of many-body systems if many of those particles come together and interact. Let me explain this in more detail: Our understanding of quantum mechanical properties is very good when we are dealing with systems consisting of only a few particles. We want to learn something about the fundamental processes in quantum mechanical systems with machines using quantum effects. The temperatures of the systems we create in the laboratory are as low as the energies created at LHC are high. This means the ticks are spaced by a factor of 1000. The focus of this text is more directed towards the fundamental aspects because there still exist many interesting open questions as well. This is currently a very hot topic and already some other of our writings touched upon this. One prominent technological goal you may have seen in the media is to build a new type of computer which makes use of quantum mechanical effects – the so-called quantum computer. ![]() The better and better understanding of quantum mechanics has led to innovations, like for example the satellite positioning (GPS), and it still holds big promises for the future. This might sound very abstract, but actually a lot of modern technologies rely on quantum mechanical effects. Generally speaking, quantum mechanics gives our nowadays best description of the fundamental processes in nature on very small length scales. Quantum phenomena are observations made in nature which can only be explained by effects of quantum mechanics. Phew! This is a lot of abstract words – so let’s take them step by step.
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