If The Matrix really existed, it would probably have to be a quantum simulator. The fictional computer in that story can create virtual worlds indistinguishable from the real one and project them into people’s minds. But the real world includes quantum phenomena, something ordinary computers can’t fully simulate.
Now physicists have created a rudimentary prototype of a machine that simulates quantum phenomena using quantum physics, rather than using data kept in a classical computer. While the new device can’t make people fly like the Matrix does, it demonstrates a technique that could enable physicists to create, in the virtual world, materials that don’t yet exist in nature and perhaps figure out how to build, in the real world, superconductors that work at room temperature, for example.
Tobias Schätz of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany and his collaborators built a model of the smallest solid object imaginable — one made of two atoms — by suspending two ions in a vacuum. The researchers used laser light to vary the electrical repulsion of the ions in order to simulate the magnetic interaction of atoms. Essentially, the machine could use one force of nature to simulate the other.
In a paper published online by Nature Physics on July 27, the researchers describe how their system reproduced the magnetic alignment of atoms that takes place when certain materials are exposed to magnetic fields.