[boothby]

I'm no physics expert but I do make programmable crystals for a living. One of my favorite applications of adiabatic quantum computers is the simulation of physical materials such as [1] wherein we see emergent phenomena like fractional magnetization. My contribution to this paper was to find the configuration of qubits equivalent to the material in question. What's really cool about experiments like this is that you can directly observe the spin configurations that give rise to the fractional states -- if you're sufficiently motivated, you could reproduce the experiment and paw through the data yourself (disclaimer: that may require you to pay my employer for QPU access). For the less motivated, see figure 3.

[1, lay coverage] https://csmd.ornl.gov/highlight/quantum-computing-enables-si...

[1, free PDF] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.01019