15 May 2026

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and MCQST, together with international collaborators at Quantinuum and the California Institute of Technology, have demonstrated an important step toward a key future application of quantum computers: the simulation of complex quantum materials beyond the reach of conventional computers.

In the study, published in Nature, the team led by Prof. Michael Knap and Prof. Frank Pollmann used Quantinuum’s trapped-ion quantum computer to investigate how interacting quantum particles behave, exchange energy, and eventually reach thermal equilibrium. Such processes are fundamental for understanding magnetic materials, heat transport, and other phenomena that play a key role in modern condensed-matter physics.

What makes the result especially significant is that the quantum simulation reached a regime in which classical computational methods begin to fail. As the complexity of the system grows, even advanced numerical approaches can no longer reliably follow the dynamics over sufficiently long times.

“Our numerical simulations showed very clearly where classical methods start to run out of resources,” says Wilhelm Kadow, PhD student at TUM, who worked on the tensor-network calculations for the project. “This is an exciting indication that quantum computers are moving closer to becoming genuinely useful tools for scientific discovery.”

The work demonstrates that today’s quantum hardware can already tackle highly complex many-body problems that are extremely challenging for conventional computation. It marks an advancement toward practical quantum computing applications in physics, materials science, and beyond.

Publication

Digital quantum magnetism on a trapped-ion quantum computer.
R. Haghshenas, E. Chertkov, M.Mills, W. Kadow, S.-H. Lin, et al. Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10445-3

Source: Article orginally publiched on the TUM NAT School Website