Zehang Bao

Two vortex rings launched one after the other pass through each other and swap places. This dance, first seen in the 19th century with smoke rings, has now been reproduced on a quantum processor. Vortices are the actors on a quantum stage where time plays the role of an extra dimension.

Five superconducting qubits on a chip: the stage for a performance of quantum chaos. Four qubits form the system, and the fifth acts as the environment, introducing dissipation. After a short evolution, the environment is discarded, leaving the system with an open quantum map, an operator that transforms the system's state.

Three thousand meters above sea level, a sheer cliff face. A classical climber picks a single route and crawls up step by step, often getting stuck in a local minimum: a small niche with no upward path. A quantum climber acts differently: it can leap across a canyon and land in a neighboring energy basin where the route is better.