When it comes to studying transportation systems, stock markets and the weather, quantum mechanics is probably the last thing to come to mind. However, scientists at Australia's Griffith University and Singapore's Nanyang Technological University have just performed a 'proof of principle' experiment showing that when it comes to simulating such complex processes in the macroscopic world quantum mechanics can provide an unexpected advantage.
Griffith's Professor Geoff Pryde, who led the project, says that such processes could be simulated using a "quantum hard drive", much smaller than the memory required for conventional simulations.
"Stephen Hawking once stated that the 21st century is the 'century of complexity', as many of today's most pressing problems, such as understanding climate change or designing transportation system, involve huge networks of interacting components," he says.
"Their simulation is thus immensely challenging, requiring storage of unprecedented amounts of data. What our experiments demonstrate is a solution may come from quantum theory, by encoding this data into a quantum system, such as the quantum states of light."
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