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Cloud Quantum Computing of an Atomic Nucleus

Achievement

Cloud Quantum Computing of an Atomic Nucleus work published in Physical Review Letters as an Editor’s Suggestion.

Significance and Impact

This work was the first to ever apply quantum computing to low-energy nuclear physics, and was the first to ever run the variational quantum eigensolver algorithm over the cloud. Work was picked up by multiple science media outlets.

Research Details

  • Computed binding energy of deuteron on IBM and Rigetti QPUs and reached an accuracy of within 2-3 %.
  • XACC enabled the programmability of this problem and its hardware-agnostic execution
  • Leveraged error mitigation strategies such as qubit measurement readout error correction and Richardson extrapolation

Overview

We report a quantum simulation of the deuteron binding energy on quantum processors accessed via cloud servers. We use a Hamiltonian from pionless effective field theory at leading order. We design a low-depth version of the unitary coupled-cluster ansatz, use the variational quantum eigensolver algorithm, and compute the binding energy to within a few percent. Our work is the first step towards scalable nuclear structure computations on a quantum processor via the cloud, and it sheds light on how to map scientific computing applications onto nascent quantum devices.

Last Updated: May 28, 2020 - 4:04 pm