Physics Colloquium

Modern plasma physics and its applications in astrophysics and fusion energy sciences has come to rely heavily on state-of-the-art computation. Many of the key discoveries over the last couple of decades in this field have been driven by advanced numerical simulations performed in the world's leading supercomputers, and the expectation is that further significant progress is tightly coupled to algorithmic advances and hardware improvements. On the other hand, the simulations that can be performed in today's, and near future, computational platforms often remain orders of magnitude smaller than required by the parameters of the environments that they are trying to simulate, suggesting that a computational paradigm shift is necessary if we are ever to perform realistic simulations of many of the problems that drive research in this field.

Quantum computers have the potential to offer up-to-exponential speed-ups for at least some types of applications. However, it is unclear how one might develop efficient quantum algorithms for the typically highly nonlinear problems that plasma physics and its applications deal with. This talk explores initial ideas along these lines, as well as some reflections on what is necessary for this field to benefit from the advent of this novel computational platform.

Join via Zoom:
https://caltech.zoom.us/j/89860951893
Meeting ID: 898 6095 1893

The colloquium is held in Feynman Lecture Hall, 201 E. Bridge.