A universal quantum computer—capable of crunching the numbers on any complex problem posed to it—is still a work in progress. But a type of specialized analog quantum computation may be on the cusp of achieving some groundbreaking results, thanks to new work by researchers in Jian-Wei Pan’s group at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).1
Pan, Yu-Ao Chen, Xing-Can Yao, and other group members sought to study the behavior of the fermionic Hubbard model (FHM), a stripped-down theoretical representation of electrons in a solid. Stripped down though it may be, it captures much of the subtle physics of strongly correlated many-body systems, and it’s thought to be relevant to perhaps the grandest many-body challenge of all: the enduringly mysterious mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity in cuprate ceramics and related materials. Unfortunately, the model, when treated as a math problem, defies even numerical solution for all but the...
