Margaret D. Reid, Bogdan Opanchuk, Laura Rosales-Zárate, Peter D. Drummond
Mesoscopic quantum paradoxes, like the famous Schr\"odinger cat, are increasingly accessible to experiment. While testing quantum mechanics under such conditions is an important challenge, the computation of quantum predictions in these states is notoriously difficult owing to exponential complexity. The most straightforward approach of using probabilistic or "Monte-Carlo" sampling was thought by Feynman and others to be impossible, due to the famous Bell inequality. It is an open question whether probabilistic simulations of these states can be carried out, and what are their error properties. Here we resolve this question by carrying out direct probabilistic simulations of several quantum paradoxes using a digital computer. We have treated multipartite Bell violations for up to 60 qubits, similar to those generated in photonic and ion-trap experiments, both with and without decoherence. Our results demonstrate that quantum paradoxes are directly accessible to probabilistic sampling methods, and we analyze the scaling properties of sampling errors. We anticipate that our results may provide a starting point for the development of more sophisticated computational tools, both for testing quantum theory at the boundary of the quantum and classical worlds, and for quantum engineering of new technologies that exploit this science.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.6305
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