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Scientists have made a quantum simulator precisely replicate the behavior of an exotic magnetic material.
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A three-seat swing never stops: one rider is always left hanging. That’s a frustrated magnet — a perpetual dance with no rest. To study it, physicists built a quantum simulator from 256 atoms, meticulously mimicking the crystal TmMgGaO₄.
The idea of simulators was proposed back in the 1980s by Richard Feynman: complex quantum systems are easier to model quantumly than to compute on ordinary computers.
The simulator showed the same magnetic behavior as the real material. But the big surprise — in the twilight zone between order and chaos, it’s not crystal defects but quantum jitters that rule. Moreover, when the simulator was given a sudden jolt, it evened out its temperature in trillionths of a second. This process comes with an explosive growth of entanglement, and just as dramatically, entropy surged.
The avalanche of entanglement resembles the expansion of the early universe: particles 'remember' each other across ever-growing distances.
So this quantum doppelgänger doesn’t just copy reality: it peers into its most fleeting moments, where ordinary computers are powerless.