Towards the Intuitive Understanding of Quantum World: Sonification of Rabi Oscillations, Wigner functions, and Quantum Simulators

TL;DR

This paper explores sonification as a novel approach to intuitively understand complex quantum phenomena by converting quantum data into sound, aiding comprehension of phenomena like Rabi oscillations and quantum phase transitions.

Contribution

It introduces methods for sonifying diverse quantum data, demonstrating how sound can represent quantum phenomena to enhance intuitive understanding.

Findings

Developed sonification techniques for Rabi oscillations and Wigner functions.

Created score representations of quantum data based on source and settings.

Showed potential of sound to make quantum phenomena more accessible.

Abstract

Recently, there has been considerable interest in "sonifying" scientific data; however, sonifying quantum processes using the newest quantum technologies, including Noise Intermediate Scale Quantum devices and quantum random number generators, is still an emerging area of research. Music technologists and composers employ the growing accessibility to diverse data from quantum mechanics as musical tools in the hope of generating new sound expressions. How different is the quantum world from the classical one, and is it possible to express the quantum world using sounds? Quantum phenomena are very different from those that we experience in our everyday lives. Thus, it is challenging to understand them intuitively. In this paper, we propose sonification as a method toward an intuitive understanding of various quantum mechanical phenomena, from Rabi oscillations and resonance fluorescence of a single atom through the generation of Schr\"odinger cat states in strong laser field physics to insulator-superfluid transition in quantum many-body systems. This paper illustrates various methods we experimented with in sonification and score representations of quantum data depending on the source data and performance settings.