Miles Stoudenmire Splinters Time To Solve Quantum Physics Problems

Miles Stoudenmire, a research scientist at the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute, explores the collective motion of hundreds or thousands of quantum particles to glean more precise information about how they interact, move and become entangled with one another.

All those interacting particles create a daunting challenge: just storing the problem as you work on it requires a tremendous amount of storage space, not to mention computational effort. To overcome this hurdle, researchers like Stoudenmire are developing more efficient tools to make accurate predictions that can be tested against experiments.

Along with visiting student John Zima, Stoudenmire identified a less resource-intensive way to run the calculations. They slice time into segments. They take small steps to capture the system’s early stages, then progressively larger steps as the dynamics slow on their way to equilibrium. This approach produces accurate results thousands of times faster than previous methods.

In this video, Stoudenmire explains how speeding up these calculations helps researchers uncover the properties of quantum systems and why it is crucial to his work at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics.