Long ago Feynman had a vision that we could one day study our favorite quantum system using quantum computers (see here). With the advent of quantum computing, this vision is moving closer into the realm of reality. One may even go one step further and imagine that nature, at the fundamental level, can be constructed as a model constructed with qubits. Quantum field theorists have been exploring this possibility for many years. One fundamental bottleneck has been to achieve asymptotic freedom in the language of qubits. This requires the microscopic model to become free (i.e., Gaussian) at short distances. This is not easy to reproduce within qubit models since the Hilbert space of a Gaussian integral is infinite dimensional which requires infinite number of qubits. Prof. Shailesh Chandrasekharan and collaborators have recently published a paper in Physical Review Letters where they show how we may be able to overcome this bottleneck at least in one spatial dimension. The role of Wilson’s renormalization group emerges beautifully in this example. The published paper can be found here.
Department of Physics