Christopher Monroe

RQS Senior Investigator Davoudi Advocates for Quantum Simulation of Extreme Physics

Theoretical nuclear and particle physicists wield quantum field theory in their efforts to understand interactions between many particles or the behavior of particles with extremely large energies. This is no easy feat: At least theoretically, quantum field theory plays out in an infinite universe with particles constantly popping in and out of existence. Even the world’s biggest supercomputer would never be able to model it exactly. Fortunately, there are many computational tricks that can make the problem more tractable—like cutting up the infinite universe into a finite grid and taking judicious statistical samples instead of tracking every parameter of every particle—but they can only help so much. Over the past few years, a growing group of scientists has become wise to the potential of quantum computers to approach these calculations in a completely new way.