Who: Sauro Succi, Senior Research Executive and Principal Investigator, Center for Life Nano Science
at la Sapienza, Roma, Instituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Head of the research line “Mesoscale Simulations”;
When: Wednesday November 26th, between 13:00 and 14:00 CET (Norway time)
Where: The lecture will be in-person in the common room (PoreLab Trondheim) and streamed in the Kelvin room ( Porelab Oslo). From anywhere else, you will be able to join via the following Zoom link:
https://uio.zoom.us/j/69096081290?pwd=bg1XKTMKjweeHqxM77VmAfbOLPD0o6.1
Title: Fluid simulations on quantum computers: “Mission impossible or a dream coming true?”
Summary: In the last few years, increasing attention has been directed to the exploration of the potential of quantum computing for classical physics problems, most notably fluid dynamics and other nonlinear transport phenomena. The potential of quantum computing for fluids is staggering; for instance, a quantum computer with about 100 effective qubits could perform global weather forecast simulations at sub-meter resolution. However, solving fluid dynamics on quantum computers is a challenge on top of a challenge because, unlike quantum mechanics, the physics of fluids is generally neither linear nor conservative, hence it cannot be mapped onto unitary quantum gates. A variety of techniques are currently being developed to circumvent both problems above. After a brief introduction to the quantum simulation of fluids in general, in this talk we shall focus on a specific technique known as Carleman embedding, which trades nonlinearity for virtually infinite dimensions. Carleman embedding as applied to the Lattice Boltzmann formulation of fluid flows shows excellent convergence properties on classical computers. However, the formulation of a corresponding quantum algorithm and the associated quantum circuit implementation still faces a number of steep challenges. Finally, we shall conclude with a few comments on the prospects of quantum computing for the simulation of flows in porous media.