Imagine trying to untangle a giant bowl of spaghetti but each noodle is doing its own dance — twisting and looping in ways that defy common sense. That’s kind of what physicists face when they study complex quantum systems.

But now scientists have built a 69-qubit quantum simulator that can handle the tangle.

This simulator, made with tiny superconducting circuits called qubits, kind of like super-sensitive switches, is special because it combines two types of quantum tricks: analog (smooth and continuous) and digital (step-by-step and precise).

Together, they let researchers peek into the strange behaviors of quantum systems — things that regular computers just can’t handle.

They watched energy ripple and spread through their system. They measured entanglement — that spooky quantum link where particles stay connected no matter how far apart they are — and saw hints of rare phase transitions. These transitions are when quantum systems flip from one state to another, like water freezing into ice.

Notably, the team spotted signs of a famous but hard-to-see event called the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, catching quantum chaos in action.

These kinds of quantum simulators are like time machines and magnifying glasses rolled into one. They let scientists explore questions that have stumped physics for decades — like how quantum materials behave, how energy moves and even how the universe itself might tick.

And this is just the beginning.

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