Speaker
Description
It is reasonable to believe that in the not-too-distant future, quantum computing will revolutionize our ability to model and understand atomic nuclei and their interactions, and will find applications well beyond basic research. Advances in technologies that allow the production of quantum hardware with a larger number of qubits and significantly smaller error rates are still a few years away, time that can be spent on developing and testing algorithms that can be used in treating the complicated nuclear many-body problem. Existing algorithms are non-trivial, and testing for even relatively small problems requires the use of interactions that mimic the complexity of inter-nucleon interactions. In this contribution, we will explore different algorithms for preparing ground states (e.g., unitary coupled cluster approach, widely used in quantum chemistry) and for determining the energy spectrum or transition strengths. The testing ground will be the phenomenological shell model, where only a small number of particles are active, but the interaction is complicated enough, with exact solutions readily available. We will use both simulators on classical computers and available quantum hardware. The main goal will be to understand how current algorithms work, how one can improve them, and how to translate them to realistic approaches for the ab initio nuclear problem, like no-core shell model or lattice implementations. Additionally, we will investigate the required quantum hardware resources needed to solve realistic nuclear structure and reaction problems.
LA-UR-21-28550