A quantum shortcut just brought 'movies' of particle collisions closer

Roland C. Farrell, a physicist at Caltech, and colleagues at the University of Washington have found a faster way to set up the opening scene of a particle collision inside a quantum computer. On IBM's 104-qubit machine they ran the new routine through more than 5,000 operations and watched two light particles collide and forge a heavier one — energy becoming mass, Einstein's E=mc² playing out in real time. The long-term goal: full step-by-step 'movies' of what happens inside colliders like the Large Hadron Collider, instead of just the before-and-after. Published in Nature Physics.