Implementation of a Quantum-simulation Algorithm of Calculating Molecular Ground-state Energy on an NMR Quantum Computer

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a quantum simulation algorithm on an NMR quantum computer to accurately compute the ground-state energy of a hydrogen molecule, achieving high precision and analyzing error sources.

Contribution

It presents the first implementation of a quantum-simulation algorithm for molecular energy calculation on an NMR system, achieving 17 bits of precision.

Findings

Successfully simulated hydrogen molecule's ground-state energy

Achieved 17 bits of precision in energy measurement

Analyzed sources of error in quantum simulation

Abstract

It is exponentially hard to simulate quantum systems by classical algorithms, while quantum computer could in principle solve this problem polynomially. We demonstrate such an quantum-simulation algorithm on our NMR system to simulate an hydrogen molecule and calculate its ground-state energy. We utilize the NMR interferometry method to measure the phase shift and iterate the process to get a high precision. Finally we get 17 precise bits of the energy value, and we also analyze the source of the error in the simulation.