Simulation of a Three-Nucleons System Transition on Quantum Circuits

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of simulating a nuclear transition in a three-nucleon system using quantum circuits, achieving reasonable accuracy and estimating transition probabilities, marking progress in quantum nuclear physics simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum circuit-based method for simulating nuclear state transitions, including state preparation and energy estimation for a three-nucleon system.

Findings

Estimated energies with ~2% and ~10% error for ground and excited states.

Successfully simulated transition probabilities as a function of polarization angle.

First demonstration of nuclear transition simulation on quantum computers.

Abstract

Quantum computers have proven to be effective in simulating many quantum systems. Simulating nuclear processes and state preparation poses significant challenges, even for traditional supercomputers. This study demonstrates the feasibility of a complete simulation of a nuclear transition, including the preparation of both ground and first excited states. To tackle the complexity of strong interactions between two and three nucleons, the states are modeled on the tritium nucleus. Both the initial and final states are represented using quantum circuits with variational quantum algorithms and inductive biases. Describing the spin-isospin states requires four qubits, and a parameterized quantum circuit that exploits a total of 16 parameters is initialized. The estimated energy has a relative error of approximately 2% for the ground state and about 10% for the first excited state of the system. The simulation estimates the transition probability between the two states as a function of the dipole polarization angle. This work marks a first step towards leveraging digital quantum computers to simulate nuclear physics.