2026/07/21 by Jack Keable-Elliott, David J. Bacon, Andrew Burbanks +1
#quant-ph #gr-qc
We present a recipe for simulating one-dimensional quantum systems for low and high energies with L qubits within the framework of first quantisation. Assuming a minimum grid spacing ΔL in the finite-difference method, the generalised uncertainty principle (GUP) is derived analytically and shows distinct properties for low- and high-energy quantum systems. In the low-energy regime, the GUP approaches to the standard Heisenberg uncertainty principle (HUP) for ΔL ≪ ℏ. However, for finite ΔL ≠ 0, the GUP mathematically provides three different regions dependent on the average momentum and suggests that a wavefunction can exhibit a single-point localisation at the finite momentum uncertainty due to lack of grid resolution. We then derive a new expression for the high-energy momentum and focus on two specific cases relevant to relativistic aspects. First, if the HUP is relaxed and the high-energy momentum is matched to the special-relativistic one, the resulting GUP predicts the existence of a minimum length with non-zero mass for high energy despite the continuous limit ΔL = 0. Second, enforcing consistency with the HUP allows the recovery of a canonical high-energy representation with no minimum length. But this requirement brings incompatibility with the special-relativistic momentum and suggests a modified energy-momentum equation. Therefore, we believe that the proposed momentum formulation provides a novel pathway to investigate quantum gravity phenomena for high energy using quantum simulation tools.