English

Using Quantum Computers to Learn Physics

Quantum Physics 2014-01-21 v1

Abstract

Since its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century, quantum mechanics has challenged our conceptions of how the universe ought to work; however, the equations of quantum mechanics can be too computationally difficult to solve using existing computers for even modestly large systems. Here I will show that quantum computers can sometimes be used to address such problems and that quantum computer science can assign formal complexities to learning facts about nature. Hence, computer science should not only be regarded as an applied science; it is also of central importance to the foundations of science.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1401.4507,
  title  = {Using Quantum Computers to Learn Physics},
  author = {Nathan Wiebe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1401.4507},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

This article is designed as a popular article aimed at a general computer science audience and mostly reviews existing results, but it does contain several new results involving Hamiltonian inference

R2 v1 2026-06-22T02:48:43.312Z