Qubits in second quantisation in fermionic simulators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a pairing scheme for fermionic modes in second quantisation to facilitate the simulation of many-body fermionic systems on quantum computers, enabling efficient measurement and analysis of correlators.

Contribution

It proposes a novel pairing approach for fermionic modes in second quantisation, allowing fermionic gates to be represented as rotations of second quantised qubits, and applies this to optimize measurement settings.

Findings

Fermionic gates can be represented as rotations of paired second quantised qubits.

Measurement of two- and four-point correlators can be formulated as a graph problem.

Various analytical and algorithmic methods can optimize measurement settings.

Abstract

Simulating many-body fermionic systems in conventional qubit-based quantum computers poses significant challenges due to the overheads associated with the encoding of fermionic statistics in qubits, leading to the proposal of native fermionic simulators as an alternative. While allowing for fermionic problems to be simulated efficiently, this class of fermionic simulators carries also specific constraints with them and poses other challenges unfamiliar to qubit systems. Here, we propose to pair fermionic modes to form a so-called qubit in second quantisation representation. This allows fermionic gates to be represented as rotations of these second quantised qubits, enabling adaptation of methods for qubit systems. As an application, we use this pairing scheme to represent the measurement of two- and four-point correlators in fermionic simulators with its native gates as a graph problem. Optimising measurement settings is then analysed with various analytical and algorithmic methods.