Physics Colloquium

Stephen Jordan, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

http://www.nist.gov/itl/math/sjordan.cfm

"Simulating quantum field theories on quantum computers"

Ever since Feynman's original proposal for quantum computers, one of the primary applications envisioned has been efficient simulation of other quantum systems. In fact, it has been conjectured that quantum computers would be universal simulators, which can simulate all physical systems using computational resources that scale polynomially with the system's number of degrees of freedom. Quantum field theories have posed a challenge in that the set of degrees of freedom is formally infinite. In this talk I will describe joint work with John Preskill and Keith Lee showing how quantum computers, if built, could nevertheless efficiently simulate quantum field theories at bounded energy scales.