Quantum Computation for Physical Modeling
Abstract
One of the most famous American physicists of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman, in 1982 was the first to propose using a quantum mechanical computing device to efficiently simulate quantum mechanical many-body dynamics 1, 2, 3, a task that is exponentially complex in the number of particles treated and is completely intractable by any classical computiiig means for large systems of many particles. In the two decades following his work, remarkable progress has been made both theoretically and experimentally in the new field of quantum computation 4, 5. Ironically, however, most of the theoretical progress in quantum computing has developed within the purview of the computer scientist with the principle applications of efficient quantum information processing re lated to cryptography and secure quantum communication. In an effort return to Feynman's original direction, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research has established a multidisciplinary basic research theme called Quantum Computation for Phvsioal Modeling to explore quantum algorithms to model dynamical physical systems. Our goal is to establish a practical and generic means by which the power of quantum mechanics (that is, quantum parallelism due to the superposition and entanglement of states) can be used to speedup numerical simulations of interest to computational physicists.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2002
- Accession Number
- ADA438854
Entities
People
- Jeffrey Yepez
Organizations
- Air Force Research Laboratory