Physicists have developed a way to model quantum systems on everyday computers, making it easier to run complex simulations without relying on supercomputers or artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
The new method updates the “truncated Wigner approximation” (TWA), a decades-old technique for approximating quantum behavior, into a plug-and-play shortcut for solving complex calculations.
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“Our approach is much less computationally expensive and makes it much easier to formulate the dynamical equations,” study co-author Jamil Marino, an assistant professor of physics at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said in a statement. “We think that in the near future this method could become the primary tool for exploring this kind of quantum mechanics on consumer computers.”
A modern take on semi-classic
First developed in the 1970s, TWA is a “semi-classical” simulation technique used to predict quantum behavior.
Quantum systems are governed by the laws of quantum mechanics and typically involve particles at incredibly small scales. At this level, phenomena such as coherence and entanglement produce effects that cannot be fully explained by classical physics alone.
These effects generate a huge number of possible outcomes, so simulating them often requires vast amounts of computing power, such as supercomputer clusters or AI networks. To facilitate the study of quantum mechanics with conventional hardware, physicists often use a theoretical framework called semiclassical physics.
Semiclassical physics allows researchers to approximate how a quantum system behaves over time by treating some parts of the quantum equation through the lens of quantum mechanics and other parts using classical physics.
TWA works by converting a quantum problem into multiple simplified classical calculations. Each calculation starts with a small amount of statistical “noise” to account for the inherent uncertainties of quantum mechanics. By performing these simplified calculations and averaging the results, researchers can get a good idea of how quantum problems play out.
However, TWA was originally developed for “idealized” quantum systems that are completely isolated from external forces. This makes the computation much more manageable as it assumes that the system evolves without interference.
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In reality, quantum systems are often open and exposed to external interference. As particles interact with their surroundings, they lose or absorb energy and gradually become incoherent. These effects, collectively known as dissipative dynamics, are outside the scope of classical TWA and make the behavior of quantum systems much more difficult to predict.
The researchers addressed this problem by extending TWA to handle the Lindblad-Master equation, a widely used mathematical framework for modeling dissipation in “open” quantum systems. They then packaged the updated method into a “practical, easy-to-use template” that acts as a conversion table, allowing physicists to embed a problem and get usable equations within hours.
“Many groups have tried this before us,” Marino said. “It is known that certain complex quantum systems can be solved efficiently with semi-classical approaches. But the real challenge was to make it accessible and easy to perform.”
Updated technology also makes TWA reusable. Instead of having to rebuild the underlying mathematics from scratch for each new problem, physicists can input system parameters into the updated framework and apply it directly. This lowers the barrier to entry and significantly speeds up calculations, the researchers say.
“Physicists can basically learn this method in one day, and by about the third day they can perform some of the most complex problems posed in this study,” study co-author Oksana Cherpanova, a postdoctoral researcher at the University at Buffalo, said in a statement.
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