I study the intersection of plasma physics and quantum computation.
What is a plasma?
A state of matter…
Plasmas are the fourth state of matter. Generally, if you take a block of material in solid form and apply heat, it will melt at some point. Apply further heat and evaporation turns the liquid into a gas. Apply even more heat and the electrons are stripped from their respective nuclei, resulting in a soup of ions (nuclei, positively charged), and electrons (negatively charged).
…which exhibits collective behavior.
Because of the dissociation of electrons and nuclei, the electrons and ions interact heavily through electromagnetic forces. These forces are long range, meaning that the movement of ions and nuclei in one corner of the plasma have direct influence on the behavior of the plasma in another corner.
Plasmas are everywhere.
99.9% of the visible matter in the universe is plasma. Luckily, the matter surrounding us here on Earth isn’t plasma. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be alive.
What is a quantum computer?
A different, not-necessarily-faster, computer…
Quantum computers differ from classical computers in that their fundamental building block, the “qubit,” behaves differently from a classical bit. You may have seen the repetitive description of quantum computers in popular science and media outlets: “while a classical bit can be 0 or 1 at any given point in time, qubits can be both 0 and 1 at the same time.”
…that can perform certain tasks better than a classical computer.
Despite what you may be reading on the internet, quantum computers aren’t going to be much faster than classical computers in everything. Rather, there’s a certain class of computational problems that quantum computers are better suited to solve than classical computers. A well-known example is Shor’s algorithm, which can factor large numbers into their primes exponentially faster than a classical computer.
Quantum computers have the potential to change many fields.
Some notable fields include cryptography and pharmaceuticals.
How is plasma physics related to quantum computing?
Plasma physics is difficult…
Plasma physics is governed by highly coupled, nonlinear partial differential equations. These equations are hard to solve on paper, and the extent to which we can understand plasma phenomena through analytical solutions is limited.
…so we resort to computer simulations.
Instead of attempting to solve the governing equations by hand, we can discretize them and feed them to a computer. The computer can solve the equations and output the solution. For instance, here’s a computer simulation of turbulence development in a tokamak.
Computer simulations are resource-expensive.
To solve plasma physics equations, one needs access to supercomputers with
thousands of processing units.
In fact, the bottleneck in making advances in plasma physics is (arguably)
the rate at which we can run simulations.
So, do quantum computers, as an alternative computational tool, have the potential to speed up plasma physics simulations?
That’s the main question my research aims to answer.