Date Time Applying Quantum Computing to a Particle Process An ATLAS particle collision event display from 2018, showing the spray of particles (orange lines) emanating from the collision of protons, and the detector readout (squares and rectangles). (Credit: ATLAS collaboration) A team of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) used a quantum computer to successfully simulate an aspect of particle collisions that is typically neglected in high-energy physics experiments, such as those that occur at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The quantum algorithm they developed accounts for the complexity of parton showers, which are complicated bursts of particles produced in the collisions that involve particle production and decay processes.