Many of nature’s most important processes depend on how particles of matter interact with light and other force-carrying particles. So far, however, it has proven difficult for conventional computers to determine how individual particles behave in these interactions.

Now, a team led by Eleanor Crane at MIT has developed a digital toolkit for simulating these interactions using quantum computing hardware, which could allow such machines to outperform their classical counterparts without the need for extensive error correction.

Their research has been published in Physical Review X.