How Noise Turns Order into Chaos on a Quantum Chip ⚡ экспресс
Scientists have seen for the first time how chaos is born in quantum devices. It turns out that noise, which has always been considered a nuisance, itself creates complex, unpredictable behavior—like wind turning a smooth lake surface into chaotic waves. Could this 'built-in' chaos become a tool for new discoveries?
The energy levels of a quantum system can be imagined as people trying to keep their distance. In an orderly regime, they crowd together predictably, but add chaos—and they scatter into a circle, forming a 'donut': a dense ring with an empty center. That's exactly the picture physicists saw for the first time when they ran two programs on a quantum chip—one orderly and one chaotic. Using spectroscopy (listening to the 'notes' of atoms), they measured the distances between levels. In the chaotic case, those levels indeed kept a respectful distance, creating a donut shape. But the main discovery happened when the orderly program was extended: the chip's internal noise—energy leakage causing an increase in entropy—itself turned order into chaos. It turns out that even tiny imperfections, considered a nuisance for computation, make any quantum processor a ready-made laboratory for studying chaos. As noted long ago by Richard Feynman and developed by David Deutsch, quantum computers can model subtle effects that aren't captured by the simple standard model of isolated systems.
🎯 Small energy losses, like in a cup of coffee cooling down or on a currency exchange, can generate chaos—and that's exactly what the quantum chip showed.
🎬 In the series 'Devs,' a quantum computer predicts the future through deterministic chaos; real chips are even more finicky—noise smears everything.