This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Collisions between particles at high energies can sometimes produce new particles and shed light on interactions between the fundamental constituents of matter. Simulating these collisions and their underlying processes could yield valuable insights into how matter behaves at extremely small scales.
Quantum computers, devices that process information using the laws of quantum mechanics, could be promising new platforms for the simulation of particle collisions. However, reliably using these devices to simulate the processes following a collision has so far proved challenging. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Washington recently developed a new method that allows quantum computers to prepare the initial wavepackets (localized disturbances linked to moving particles) for particle-collision simulations more efficiently.
Their approach, introduced in a paper published in Nature Physics, was used to prepare wavepackets and simulate particle collisions on a quantum processor containing 104 qubits (basic units of quantum information). "In the future, we would like to be able to predict what happens shortly after particles are smashed together in particle colliders like the LHC," Roland C. Farrell, first author of the paper, told Phys.org.
"The types of particles that emerge from these collisions and their dynamics provide insights into the laws of nature. Simulating these collisions is widely considered to be intractable using a classical computer but is believed to be efficient on a quantum computer." One of the main objectives of the team's study was to successfully use a quantum computer to simulate a particle collision and observe the conversion of some colliding particles' energy into the mass of newly produced particles in real time. This conversion is a direct manifestation of Einstein's equation E = mc², which describes the relationship between energy (E) and mass (m), where c is the speed of light.
This equation suggests that when enough energy is available, energy can become mass. "The first step in such a quantum simulation is to prepare the initial state: two high-energy particles (wavepackets) moving toward each other," said Farrell. "Existing approaches made this infeasible on current hardware, so we needed to develop a more efficient quantum algorithm." The simulations run by Farrell and his colleagues were rooted in a simplified model of particle interactions called one-dimensional Ising field theory.
The team developed a new algorithm that could be used to prepare moving particles, or wavepackets, for their simulation. "After the initial state of two particles is prepared, the system is evolved in time by applying quantum gates that approximate Hamiltonian evolution," said Nikita A. Zemlevskiy, a co-author on the paper.
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