This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Physicists in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford have used a hybrid quantum computer, made up of qubits and quantum oscillators, to observe the Aharonov–Bohm effect in a quantum simulation. The effect is a quantum phenomenon in which a particle can acquire a measurable phase by traveling around a magnetic flux, even though it never passes through a region where a magnetic field is present.
The result demonstrates how hybrid quantum systems can be used to simulate interactions between matter and gauge fields that become increasingly difficult to model on classical computers. The paper has been published in Nature Physics. In classical, everyday physics, the motion of a charged particle is determined locally by the electric and magnetic fields it encounters.
Quantum mechanics allows a more subtle effect. In 1959, physicists Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm predicted that a charged particle traveling around, rather than through, a region containing a magnetic field would still pick up a measurable trace of that field's presence. This became known as the Aharonov–Bohm effect, and it was later confirmed in experiments with real electrons.
Physicists are now interested in seeing the effect emerge in a different setting: lattice gauge theories. These are mathematical frameworks used to describe interactions between matter and gauge fields, including important models in particle and high-energy physics. In a lattice gauge theory, matter sits at the points of a grid, and the fields live on the links connecting those points.
The difficulty is that as these systems grow, their behavior becomes increasingly difficult to calculate on a classical computer. Quantum computers, which operate according to the same quantum rules the theories describe, offer another approach: Rather than solving the full dynamics on a classical computer, researchers build a physical system that behaves in the same way and observe what it does. This is known as quantum simulation.
Beginning in 2022, lead author Dr. Oana Bazavan and colleagues in Oxford, working with Dr. Alejandro Bermudez from the Instituto de Física Teórica in Madrid, developed an experiment to simulate lattice gauge theories using a hybrid quantum system.
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