Accurate Computation of Relativistic Excitation Energies Using Quantum Annealing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the use of quantum annealing to accurately compute relativistic excitation energies in many-electron systems, achieving high agreement with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel quantum annealing approach with a new qubit encoding and perturbation strategy for relativistic quantum calculations.

Findings

Achieved 98.9% accuracy in fine structure splitting of boron-like ions

First application of quantum annealing to relativistic quantum many-body systems

Developed a quantum annealing workflow with novel encoding and decomposition methods

Abstract

We report the first results for the computation of relativistic effects in quantum many-body systems using quantum annealers. An average accuracy of 98.9% in the fine structure splitting of boron-like ions with respect to experiments has been achieved using the Quantum Annealer Eigensolver (QAE) algorithm on the D-Wave Advantage hardware. We obtain these results in the framework of the many-electron Dirac theory. We implement QAE through our quantum annealing workflow that includes a novel qubit encoding scheme and a perturbation theory-based decomposition strategy.