No Arabic abstract
A revised version of the massively parallel simulator of a universal quantum computer, described in this journal eleven years ago, is used to benchmark various gate-based quantum algorithms on some of the most powerful supercomputers that exist today. Adaptive encoding of the wave function reduces the memory requirement by a factor of eight, making it possible to simulate universal quantum computers with up to 48 qubits on the Sunway TaihuLight and on the K computer. The simulator exhibits close-to-ideal weak-scaling behavior on the Sunway TaihuLight,on the K computer, on an IBM Blue Gene/Q, and on Intel Xeon based clusters, implying that the combination of parallelization and hardware can track the exponential scaling due to the increasing number of qubits. Results of executing simple quantum circuits and Shors factorization algorithm on quantum computers containing up to 48 qubits are presented.
We describe portable software to simulate universal quantum computers on massive parallel computers. We illustrate the use of the simulation software by running various quantum algorithms on different computer architectures, such as a IBM BlueGene/L, a IBM Regatta p690+, a Hitachi SR11000/J1, a Cray X1E, a SGI Altix 3700 and clusters of PCs running Windows XP. We study the performance of the software by simulating quantum computers containing up to 36 qubits, using up to 4096 processors and up to 1 TB of memory. Our results demonstrate that the simulator exhibits nearly ideal scaling as a function of the number of processors and suggest that the simulation software described in this paper may also serve as benchmark for testing high-end parallel computers.
Forty years ago, Richard Feynman proposed harnessing quantum physics to build a more powerful kind of computer. Realizing Feynmans vision is one of the grand challenges facing 21st century science and technology. In this article, well recall Feynmans contribution that launched the quest for a quantum computer, and assess where the field stands 40 years later.
Quantum computing, an innovative computing system carrying prominent processing rate, is meant to be the solutions to problems in many fields. Among these realms, the most intuitive application is to help chemical researchers correctly de-scribe strong correlation and complex systems, which are the great challenge in current chemistry simulation. In this paper, we will present a standalone quantum simulation tool for chemistry, ChemiQ, which is designed to assist people carry out chemical research or molecular calculation on real or virtual quantum computers. Under the idea of modular programming in C++ language, the software is designed as a full-stack tool without third-party physics or chemistry application packages. It provides services as follow: visually construct molecular structure, quickly simulate ground-state energy, scan molecular potential energy curve by distance or angle, study chemical reaction, and return calculation results graphically after analysis.
In 1995, a team of physicists from the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk was able to observe the splitting of a photon in the Coulomb field of an atomic nucleus for the first time, and reported the preliminary results of this experiment at two conferences. This was an extremely difficult experiment as the probability of the process is very small. It took another seven years to publish the final results. This story has been further developed recently. The ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider observed in ultra-peripheral heavy ion collisions a process related to the photon splitting - light by light scattering. In addition, a team of Italian, Polish and British astrophysicists obtained the first observational evidence of the existence of vacuum birefringence in the magnetic field of an isolated neutron star - another physical phenomenon also related to the photon splitting. These new developments triggered this essay, written several years ago.
Three years after the completion of the next-to-leading order calculation, the status of the theoretical estimates of $epsilon/epsilon$ is reviewed. In spite of the theoretical progress, the prediction of $epsilon/epsilon$ is still affected by a 100% theoretical error. In this paper the different sources of uncertainty are critically analysed and an updated estimate of $epsilon/epsilon$ is presented. Some theoretical implications of a value of $epsilon/epsilon$ definitely larger than $10^{-3}$ are also discussed.