Nuclear shell-model simulation in digital quantum computers

Abstract The nuclear shell model is one of the prime many-body methods to study the structure of atomic nuclei, but it is hampered by an exponential scaling on the basis size as the number of particles increases. We present a shell-model quantum circuit design strategy to find nuclear ground states...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: A. Pérez-Obiol, A. M. Romero, J. Menéndez, A. Rios, A. García-Sáez, B. Juliá-Díaz
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Portfolio 2023-07-01
Series:Scientific Reports
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-39263-7
Description
Summary:Abstract The nuclear shell model is one of the prime many-body methods to study the structure of atomic nuclei, but it is hampered by an exponential scaling on the basis size as the number of particles increases. We present a shell-model quantum circuit design strategy to find nuclear ground states by exploiting an adaptive variational quantum eigensolver algorithm. Our circuit implementation is in excellent agreement with classical shell-model simulations for a dozen of light and medium-mass nuclei, including neon and calcium isotopes. We quantify the circuit depth, width and number of gates to encode realistic shell-model wavefunctions. Our strategy also addresses explicitly energy measurements and the required number of circuits to perform them. Our simulated circuits approach the benchmark results exponentially with a polynomial scaling in quantum resources for each nucleus. This work paves the way for quantum computing shell-model studies across the nuclear chart and our quantum resource quantification may be used in configuration-interaction calculations of other fermionic systems.
ISSN:2045-2322