Dresden 2014 – scientific programme

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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen

TT 36: Focus Session: Advanced Algorithms for Strongly Correlated Quantum Matter

TT 36.1: Invited Talk

Tuesday, April 1, 2014, 09:30–10:00, HSZ 03

Quantum Computing and Strongly Correlated Materials — •Matthias Troyer — ETH Zurich

Feynman's proposal of using quantum mechanics to solve hard quantum problem was the origin of the field of quantum computing. The same idea is at the heart of optical lattice quantum simulators, which can be viewed as special-purpose analog quantum computers. As successful as optical lattice quantum simulators are in emulating the Hubbard model and variants thereof, they suffer from several limitations: they can only simulate particular models that arise naturally from the underlying quantum system used to build the simulator, and reaching low effective temperatures is a challenge. Both of these problems can be overcome on (future) universal quantum computers. With small quantum computers becoming feasible in the next years it is time to think about how a quantum computer can help us solve strongly correlated electron problems. In this talk I will thus review quantum algorithms for the simulation of quantum systems and will estimate what size quantum computer could outperform a classical computer for these problems. I will also show that the exact ab-initio simulation of materials will be infeasible even on quantum hardware and that thus the model-based approach of first mapping materials to effective models will remain crucial.