Quantum simulator for many-body electron-electron Coulomb interaction with ion traps

TL;DR

This paper proposes an ion trap-based quantum simulator for many-body electron-electron Coulomb interactions, enabling efficient and feasible simulation of complex electronic systems with minimal noise susceptibility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analog quantum simulation method using ion traps to emulate electronic Coulomb interactions, applicable in multiple dimensions and adaptable to various topological phases.

Findings

Simulation runtime is much shorter than electronic system timescales.

No additional complexity overhead for energy spectrum simulation.

Feasible with current ion trap technologies.

Abstract

We propose an analog quantum simulator that uses ion traps to realize the many-body electron-electron Coulomb interaction of an electron gas. This proposal maps a system that is difficult to solve and control to an experimentally-feasible setup that can be realized with current technologies. Using a dilatation transform, we show that ion traps can efficiently simulate electronic Coulomb interactions. No complexity overhead is added if only the energy spectrum is desired, and only a simple unitary transform is needed on the initial state otherwise. The runtime of the simulation is found to be much shorter than the timescale of the corresponding electronic system, minimizing susceptibility of the proposed quantum simulator to external noise and decoherence. This proposal works in any number of dimensions, and could be used to simulate different topological phases of electrons in graphene-like structures, by using ions trapped in honeycomb lattices.