Non-adiabatic molecular quantum dynamics with quantum computers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantum algorithm for simulating non-adiabatic chemical processes, enabling polynomial scaling in system size and potentially revolutionizing the study of photophysical phenomena beyond classical capabilities.

Contribution

It presents the first-quantization quantum algorithm and initialization scheme for simulating coupled electron-nuclear dynamics on quantum computers, addressing a key challenge in non-adiabatic process simulation.

Findings

Polynomial scaling of resources with system size

First-quantization method for wavepacket evolution

Potential to study classically intractable photophysical processes

Abstract

The theoretical investigation of non-adiabatic processes is hampered by the complexity of the coupled electron-nuclear dynamics beyond the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. Classically, the simulation of such reactions is limited by the unfavourable scaling of the computational resources as a function of the system size. While quantum computing exhibits proven quantum advantage for the simulation of real-time dynamics, the study of quantum algorithms for the description of non-adiabatic phenomena is still unexplored. In this work, we propose a quantum algorithm for the simulation of fast non-adiabatic chemical processes together with an initialization scheme for quantum hardware calculations. In particular, we introduce a first-quantization method for the time evolution of a wavepacket on two coupled harmonic potential energy surfaces (Marcus model). In our approach, the computational resources scale polynomially in the system dimensions, opening up new avenues for the study of photophysical processes that are classically intractable.