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Thursday, April 23, 2015
12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
T-DO Conference Room

Quantum Lunch

Computational Complexity of Quantum Field Theory

Stephen Jordan
NIST

Numerical simulation of quantum dynamics is a notoriously difficult problem. In the worst case, simulating the quantum many-body problem is believed to require exponential time and memory as a function of the number of particles. On the other hand, quantum algorithms for simulating quantum many-body physics have been devised which provably scale polynomially in the number of particles. Simulating quantum field theories poses special challenges as particle number is not conserved and initial states may be difficult to prepare. In this talk I will describe recent work with Keith Lee, John Preskill, and Hari Krovi on quantum algorithms for simulating quantum field theories efficiently and on formal evidence that classical computers require exponential time to achieve this task.

Host: Rolando Somma