awrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicists Christian Bauer, Marat Freytsis and Benjamin Nachman have leveraged an IBM Q quantum computer through the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Quantum Computing User Program to capture part of a calculation of two protons colliding. The calculation can show the probability that an outgoing particle will emit additional particles.

In the team’s recent paper, published in Physical Review Letters, the researchers describe how they used a method called effective field theory to break down their full theory into components. Ultimately, they developed a quantum algorithm to allow the computation of some of these components on a quantum computer while leaving other computations for classical computers.

“For a theory that’s close to nature, we showed how this would work in principle. Then we took a very simplified version of that theory and did an explicit calculation on a quantum computer,” Nachman said.

The Berkeley Lab team aims to uncover insights about the smallest building blocks of nature by observing high-energy particle collisions in laboratory environments, such as the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. The team is exploring what happens in these collisions by using calculations to compare predictions with the actual collision debris.