Quantum Mechanics for Fluid Dynamics

Similarly to many-body quantum systems, turbulent flows suffer from a "curse of dimensionality". Here, the curse emerges from the exponentially large number of degrees of freedom needed to exactly resolve all length and time scales of eddy structures. If chemical reactions are considered, to simulate combustion processes, the complexity escalates even further.

It has been recently shown that due to the energy cascade mechanism, tensor networks can be leveraged to vastly compress the information required to correctly capture all the scales of turbulent flows. This also indicates that turbulence can be simulated through shallow quantum circuits, opening the door for performing computational fluid dynamics on quantum hardware. Motivated by these observations, our group aims at developing and implementing tensor network and quantum computing algorithms to simulate turbulent and reacting flows more efficiently than with standard numerical methods.