PDEs are PDEs, regardless of where they come from Newtonian or quantum. Would you care to elaborate why you think quantum requires a new kind of numerical analysis?
For field theory, you can still go some way using normal finite-difference approaches, but you have entered a huge can of worms regarding stability. For quantum physics, the problem starts well before you even get to writing a solver, since (at least for QFT) you are actually dealing with operator-valued distributions rather than normal fields - and that in extremely high (even infinite) dimensional spaces. That means you actually need to solve a path integral instead of PDEs if you want to do any sort of actual numerics, which comes with its very own can of worms. And even if the numeric discretisation is at least mathematically valid, you still need to solve the damn thing over a huge configuration space (depending on your lattice size). Even with purely statistical methods and modern supercomputing, you're quickly running into the limit of what can be achieved in reasonable time for comparatively simple systems. But nobody in e.g. lattice QCD uses normal PDE solvers.
The challenges you mentioned, and techniques to address them, are not unique to quantum physics. I am still not understanding how quantum physics require "new" kind of numerical analysis. And what are these new kinds of techniques you hint at? Could you give me some examples of unique techniques that arose from quantum physics and are not used elsewhere?
sigmoid10|3 months ago
quanto|3 months ago