In principle, a quantum system could be used to simulate another quantum system. The purpose of such a simulation would be to obtain information about problems which are difficult to simulate on a classical computer due to the exponential increase of the Hilbert space with the size of the system and which cannot be readily measured or controlled in an experiment. The system will interact with the surrounding environment and with the other particles in the system, and be implemented using imperfect controls, making it subject to noise. It has been suggested that noise does not need to be controlled to the same extent as it must be for general quantum computing. However, the effects of noise in quantum simulations are not well understood and how best to treat them in most cases is not known. In this paper we study an existing quantum algorithm for simulating the one-dimensional Fano-Anderson model using a liquid-state NMR device. We examine models of noise in the evolution using different initial states in the original model. We also add interacting spins to simulate a realistic situation where an environment of spins is present. We find that states which are entangled with their environment, and sometimes correlated but not necessarily entangled, have an evolution which is described by maps which are not completely positive. We discuss the conditions for this to occur and also the implications.
In principle, a quantum system could be used to simulate another quantum system. The purpose of such a simulation would be to obtain information about problems which are difficult to simulate on a classical computer due to the exponential increase of the Hilbert space with the size of the system and which cannot be readily measured or controlled in an experiment. The system will interact with the surrounding environment and with the other particles in the system, and be implemented using imperfect controls, making it subject to noise. It has been suggested that noise does not need to be controlled to the same extent as it must be for general quantum computing. However, the effects of noise in quantum simulations are not well understood and how best to treat them in most cases is not known. In this paper we study an existing quantum algorithm for simulating the one-dimensional Fano-Anderson model using a liquid-state NMR device. We examine models of noise in the evolution using different initial states in the original model. We also add interacting spins to simulate a realistic situation where an environment of spins is present. We find that states which are entangled with their environment, and sometimes correlated but not necessarily entangled, have an evolution which is described by maps which are not completely positive. We discuss the conditions for this to occur and also the implications.
In principle a quantum system could be used to simulate another quantum system. The purpose of such a simulation would be to obtain information about problems which are difficult to simulate on a classical computer due to the exponential increase of the Hilbert space with the size of the system, and which cannot be readily measured or controlled in an experiment. A quantum simulator is, however, an open quantum system that will interact with the surrounding environment, which in this case are other particles in the system, and will be implemented using imperfect controls, making it subject to noise. It has been suggested that noise does not need to be controlled to the same extent as it must be for general quantum information processing. However, the effects of noise in quantum simulations are not well understood and how best to treat them in most cases is not known. In the present work we study an existing quantum algorithm for the simulation of the one-dimensional Fano-Anderson model. This algorithm was proposed for a liquid-state NMR device. We examine models of noise in the evolution using different initial states in the original model. We also add interacting spins to simulate realistic situation where an environment of spins is present. We find that states which are entangled with their environment, and sometimes correlated but not necessarily entangled have an evolution which is described by maps which are not completely positive. We discuss the conditions for this to occur and also the implications.
Recent advances in the field of quantum computing hardware motivate the search for applications which demonstrate so-called quantum advantage. One promising use case that has been identified is the simulation of quantum many-body systems. The computational resources required for performing such a simulation on a classical computer generally grow exponentially with the size of the system being modeled, which is ultimately due to the exponential growth of the Hilbert space in which the dynamics of such a system take place. While digital quantum computers natively evolve quantum states directly in such a Hilbert space, thus naively avoiding this problem, the result of such a computation is typically not obtained as a deterministic output. Rather, it requires projective measurements which are fundamentally affected by shot noise. Any desired expectation values must therefore be reconstructed from repeated measurements, making the number of those measurements a relevant computational resource, and thus an important consideration for any potential claims of quantum advantage. In this work, we study how this resource scales with system size (a scaling which itself depends on the desired accuracy of the final result), using the simulation of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra as a test case. We study this scaling for both real-world molecules, as well as a class of model NMR Hamiltonians which allow for efficient large-scale simulations with one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and all-to-all interactions. We find that the required resources increase only weakly with molecular size, far below the exponential growth of the underlying Hilbert space. This result suggests that shot noise should not pose a fundamental barrier to achieving quantum advantage in the simulation of NMR systems, and perhaps for many-body systems more broadly.
Recently developed quantum algorithms suggest that in principle, quantum computers can solve problems such as simulation of physical systems more efficiently than classical computers. Much remains to be done to implement these conceptual ideas into actual quantum computers. As a small-scale demonstration of their capability, we simulate a simple many-fermion problem, the Fano-Anderson model, using liquid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). We carefully designed our experiment so that the resource requirement would scale up polynomially with the size of the quantum system to be simulated. The experimental results obtained give us an insight to the quantum control required when simulating quantum systems with NMR techniques. The simulation of other physical systems, with different particle statistics, is also discussed.
The speedup provided by quantum algorithms with respect to their classical counterparts is at the origin of scientific interest in quantum computation. However, the fundamental reasons for such a speedup are not yet completely understood and deserve further attention. In this context, the classical simulation of quantum algorithms is a useful tool that can help us in gaining insight. Starting from the study of general conditions for classical simulation, we highlight several important differences between two nonequivalent classes of quantum algorithms. We investigate their performance under realistic conditions by quantitatively studying their resilience with respect to static noise. This latter refers to errors affecting the initial preparation of the register used to run an algorithm. We also compare the evolution of the entanglement involved in the different computational processes.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of noise in quantum simulation. An existing and simple model was used to simulate the results of the evolution of an initial quantum state. The results show that if all states align in z-axis, the dynamical map is completely positive, and the spin bath affected how fast the system evolved. If precessing states are considered, the dynamical map is non completely positive. Visualization of the Bloch vector was used to illustrate the process of the evolution of the quantum system.
The goal of research in quantum information is to investigate how quantum systems can be used to store, transmit and elaborate information and how the non-classical nature of their correlations allows defining protocols that outperform their classical counterparts. Despite of the many progresses, both theoretical and experimental, made in this field in the latest decades, many challenges lie ahead for practical implementations of quantum technologies. One of the most important ones is caused by the unavoidable interaction of quantum systems with their surroundings: The coupling to the environment is generally detrimental to the quantum information contained in the system as the system undergoes decoherence. In the quest for quantum technologies, it is fundamental to overcome the problem of decoherence and loss of information. Different physical implementations of qubits, such as superconducting and solid-state devices, are affected by the interaction with the environment in a way that can be described in terms of classical stochastic noise. The classical noise model can also be used to give an approximate, sometimes equivalent, description of full quantum models of system-environment interaction. This thesis contains my personal contribution to the study of the dynamics of discrete-variable quantum systems affected by classical noise. It covers in particular single- and two-qubit systems affected by Gaussian and non-Gaussian noise. It also discusses the dynamics of a quantum walk affected by spatially correlated classical noise. Analytical solutions for particular forms of noise and interactions, and a general numerical method for simulation of the dynamics are presented. Moreover, the thesis presents the experimental implementation of a quantum optical simulator of noisy dynamics of single-qubit systems. Finally, the use of quantum systems as probes of the spectral properties of large classical environments is discussed, showing that entanglement is a resource for improvements in the precision of the estimation.