A team of physicists from the University at Buffalo has developed a user-friendly method that allows researchers to solve complex quantum problems, once thought to require massive supercomputers, on an ordinary laptop.
The breakthrough extends a powerful “physics shortcut” and provides a practical template that could soon become a primary tool for exploring quantum dynamics.
The approach makes the computationally affordable method known as the truncated Wigner approximation (TWA) accessible for a much wider range of real-world problems.
“Our approach offers a significantly lower computational cost and a much simpler formulation of the dynamical equations,” said Dr. Jamir Marino, the study’s corresponding author and an assistant professor of physics in the UB College of Arts and Sciences.
“We think this method could, in the near future, become the primary tool for exploring these kinds of quantum dynamics on consumer-grade computers.”
Addressing long-standing challenge
At the quantum scale, tiny particles can interact in more than a trillion configurations at once, creating simulations so complex they typically rely on supercomputers or even artificial intelligence.
While the physics community has known that a simpler approach was theoretically possible for some of these systems, making it a practical reality has been a long-standing challenge.
The TWA method, which dates back to the 1970s, offers a “semiclassical” middle ground, keeping just enough quantum behavior to remain accurate while simplifying the math.
However, its use was historically limited to idealized, isolated quantum systems where no energy is gained or lost.
“A lot of what appears complicated isn’t actually complicated,” Dr. Marino explained.
“Physicists can use supercomputing resources on the systems that need a full-fledged quantum approach and solve the rest quickly with our approach.”
Work on “messier” systems
Dr. Marino’s team successfully expanded TWA to work on the “messier” systems found in nature, where particles are influenced by outside forces and leak energy into their surroundings—a phenomenon known as dissipative spin dynamics.
Notably, the team transformed what was once pages of dense mathematics into a straightforward, practical template. In the past, researchers had to re-derive the complex equations from scratch for each new quantum problem.
The new framework acts like a conversion table, allowing physicists to simply plug in their problem and get usable results, often in a matter of hours.
“Physicists can essentially learn this method in one day, and by about the third day, they are running some of the most complex problems we present in the study,” said Oksana Chelpanova, a co-author on the study and a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Marino’s lab at UB.
Freeing up resources for immense challenges
The new tool is expected to free up valuable supercomputing resources for the truly immense quantum challenges.
“These are systems that can’t be solved with a semiclassical approach,” concluded the researchers in a press release.
“Systems with not just a trillion possible states, but more states than there are atoms in the universe.”
The study has been published in the PRX Quantum journal.