Physicists Reveal How to Cope with Frustration
Wednesday, June 2, 2010 - 12:50
in Physics & Chemistry
"Frustrated" systems -- those in which the interacting components cannot reach a single minimum-energy state -- are of enormous interest to fields from neural networks and protein folding to social structures and magnetism. But they have been difficult to study because even systems with small numbers of objects cannot be modeled on the best conventional computers. Now a research team has devised a scalable quantum-mechanical simulation.