Deep within every piece of magnetic material, electrons dance to the invisible tune of quantum mechanics. Their spins, akin to tiny atomic tops, dictate the magnetic behavior of the material they inhabit. This microscopic ballet is the cornerstone of magnetic phenomena, and it’s these spins that a team of JILA researchers—headed by JILA Fellows and University of Colorado Boulder professors Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn—has learned to control with remarkable precision, potentially redefining the future of electronics and data storage.

In a Science Advances publication, the JILA team—along with collaborators from universities in Sweden, Greece, and Germany—probed the spin dynamics within a special material known as a Heusler compound: a mixture of metals that behaves like a single magnetic material.

For this study, the researchers utilized a compound of cobalt, manganese, and gallium, which behaved as a conductor for electrons whose spins were aligned upwards and as an insulator for electrons whose spins were aligned downwards.

The idea of simulating quantum physics with controllable quantum devices had been proposed several decades ago. With the extensive development of quantum technology, large-scale simulation, such as the analog quantum simulation tailoring an artificial Hamiltonian mimicking the system of interest, has been implemented on elaborate quantum experimental platforms. However, due to the limitations caused by the significant noises and the connectivity, analog simulation is generically infeasible on near-term quantum computing platforms. Here we propose an alternative analog simulation approach on near-term quantum devices. Our approach circumvents the limitations by adaptively partitioning the bath into several groups based on the performance of the quantum devices.

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(Phys.org)—Quantum computers are inherently different from their classical counterparts because they involve quantum phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, which do not exist in classical digital computers. But in a new paper, physicists have shown that a classical analog computer can be used to emulate a quantum computer, along with quantum superposition and entanglement, with the result that the fully classical system behaves like a true quantum computer.

Physicist Brian La Cour and electrical engineer Granville Ott at Applied Research Laboratories, The University of Texas at Austin (ARL: UT), have published a paper on the classical emulation of a quantum computer in a recent issue of The New Journal of Physics. Besides having fundamental interest, using classical systems to emulate quantum computers could have practical advantages, since such quantum emulation devices would be easier to build and more robust to decoherence compared with true quantum computers.

“We hope that this work removes some of the mystery and ‘weirdness’ associated with quantum computing by providing a concrete, classical analog,” La Cour told Phys.org. “The insights gained should help develop exciting new technology in both classical analog computing and true quantum computing.”

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