22–23 Dec 2025
Dipartimento di Fisica
Europe/Rome timezone

How hard is it to simulate a quantum many-body system?

22 Dec 2025, 11:45
30m
Aula C (Dipartimento di Fisica)

Aula C

Dipartimento di Fisica

Via Pietro Giuria 1, 10125 Torino
Talk Talks

Speaker

paolo stornati (ICFO)

Description

Classical simulations play a central role in many-body quantum physics, from lattice gauge theories to strongly correlated systems, yet their computational cost varies dramatically across different regimes. In this talk, I will discuss how the complexity of simulating quantum many-body systems can be understood in terms of physical resources carried by quantum states.
I will first review tensor network methods, focusing on matrix product states, and explain how entanglement entropy—via area laws—controls their efficiency in one dimension. I will then argue why entanglement alone is not sufficient to characterize classical simulability, highlighting the special role of stabilizer states and introducing stabilizer Rényi entropy as a measure of non-Clifford complexity.
Finally, I will present recent results on fermionic many-body systems, where highly entangled Gaussian states remain efficiently simulable. I will show how fermionic non-Gaussianity, quantified by fermionic antiflatness, emerges as a key resource governing the classical complexity of fermionic simulations.

Author

Presentation materials