Quantum computer accurately simulates real magnetic materials, reproducing national laboratory data
Studying and designing novel materials is a central application of quantum mechanics. Chemists, materials scientists, and physicists focus on subtle interactions in quantum materials and to uncover them they rely on sophisticated ...
In new preprint, a team of researchers from Oak Ridge National Lab's (ORNL's) Quantum Science Center (QSC), Purdue University, Los Alamos Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Tennessee, and IBM used quantum simulation to compute the energy-momentum spectrum of a well-studied magnetic material, KCuF3, showing strong agreement with the spectra measured via neutron scattering. The research is published on the arXiv preprint server.
The quantum simulations employed the IBM Quantum Heron processor, while the experimental data was acquired from neutron sources at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at ORNL and at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom. This work serves as another realization of Richard Feynman's vision: the use of a well-controlled, programmable quantum system to simulate the properties of a quantum system of interest.
"This is the most impressive match I've seen between experimental data and qubit simulation, and it definitely raises the bar for what can be expected from quantum computers," said study co-author Allen Scheie, condensed matter physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "I am extremely excited about what this means for science."
Up to the task
By bombarding a sample of KCuF3 with neutrons and measuring the scattered neutrons' energy and momentum, experimentalists can probe the material's dynamical and structural properties. Neutrons weakly interact with the system, so they provide very clean data on the true state of the material, according to principal investigator Arnab Banerjee, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University.