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arXiv:1205.2421 · Scientific Reports

Experimental simulation of quantum tunneling in small systems

Guanru Feng, Yao Lu, Liang Hao, Feihao Zhang, Gui‐Lu Long

Published Aug 20, 2013• 35 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

It is well known that quantum computers are superior to classical computers in efficiently simulating quantum systems. Here we report the first experimental simulation of quantum tunneling through potential barriers, a widespread phenomenon of a unique quantum nature, via NMR techniques. Our experiment is based on a digital particle simulation algorithm and requires very few spin-1/2 nuclei without the need of ancillary qubits. The occurrence of quantum tunneling through a barrier, together with the oscillation of the state in potential wells, are clearly observed through the experimental results. This experiment has clearly demonstrated the possibility to observe and study profound physical phenomena within even the reach of small quantum computers.

DOI
10.1038/srep02232

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It is well known that quantum computers are superior to classical computers in efficiently simulating quantum systems. Here we report the first experimental simulation of quantum tunneling through potential barriers, a widespread phenomenon of a unique quantum nature, via NMR techniques. Our experiment is based on a digital particle simulation algorithm and requires very few spin-1/2 nuclei without the need of ancillary qubits. The occurrence of quantum tunneling through a barrier, together with the oscillation of the state in potential wells, are clearly observed through the experimental results. This experiment has clearly demonstrated the possibility to observe and study profound physical phenomena within even the reach of small quantum computers.
Quantum computers are the promising candidates for simulation of large quantum systems, which is a daunting task to perform in a classical computer. Here, we report the experimental realization of quantum tunneling of a single particle through different types of potential barriers by performing digital quantum simulations using IBM quantum computers. We consider two and three-qubit systems to visualize the tunneling process and illustrate its unique quantum nature. We observe the tunneling and oscillations of the particles in a step-well, double-well, and multi-well potentials through our experimental results. One may extend the proposed quantum circuits and simulation techniques used here for observing the tunneling phenomena for multi-particle systems in different potentials.
A number of quantum algorithms have been performed on small quantum computers; these include Shor's prime factorization algorithm, error correction, Grover's search algorithm and a number of analog and digital quantum simulations. Because of the number of gates and qubits necessary, however, digital quantum particle simulations remain untested. A contributing factor to the system size required is the number of ancillary qubits needed to implement matrix exponentials of the potential operator. Here, we show that a set of tunneling problems may be investigated with no ancillary qubits and a cost of one single-qubit operator per time step for the potential evolution, eliminating at least half of the quantum gates required for the algorithm and more than that in the general case. Such simulations are within reach of current quantum computer architectures.
In the usual quantum tunneling, a low-energy quantum particle penetrates across a physical barrier of higher potential energy, by traversing a classically forbidden region, and finally escapes into another region. In an analogous scenario, a classical particle inside a closed regular region in the phase space is dynamically bound from escaping to other regions of the phase space. Here, the physical potential barrier is replaced by dynamical barriers which separate different regions of the phase space. However, in the quantum regime, the system can overcome such dynamical barriers and escape through them, giving rise to dynamical tunneling. In chaotic Hamiltonian systems, dynamical tunneling refers to quantum tunneling between states whose classical limits correspond to symmetry-related regular regions separated by a chaotic zone between which any classical transport is prohibited. Here, an experimental realization of dynamical tunneling in spin systems is reported using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) architecture. In particular, dynamical tunneling in quantum kicked tops of spin-1 and spin-3/2 systems using two- and three-qubit NMR registers is investigated. By extracting time-dependent expectation values of the angular momentum operator components, size-dependent tunneling behavior for various initial states is systematically investigated. Further, by monitoring the adverse effects of dephasing noise on the tunneling oscillations, we assert the importance of quantum coherence in enabling dynamical tunneling.
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.
Simulations of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments can be an important tool for extracting information about molecular structure and optimizing experimental protocols but are often intractable on classical computers for large molecules such as proteins and for protocols such as zero-field NMR. We demonstrate the first quantum simulation of an NMR spectrum, computing the zero-field spectrum of the methyl group of acetonitrile using four qubits of a trapped-ion quantum computer. We reduce the sampling cost of the quantum simulation by an order of magnitude using compressed sensing techniques. We show how the intrinsic decoherence of NMR systems may enable the zero-field simulation of classically hard molecules on relatively near-term quantum hardware and discuss how the experimentally demonstrated quantum algorithm can be used to efficiently simulate scientifically and technologically relevant solid-state NMR experiments on more mature devices. Our work opens a practical application for quantum computation.
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) provides an experimental setting to explore physical implementations of quantum information processing (QIP). Here we introduce the basic background for understanding applications of NMR to QIP and explain their current successes, limitations and potential. NMR spectroscopy is well known for its wealth of diverse coherent manipulations of spin dynamics. Ideas and instrumentation from liquid state NMR spectroscopy have been used to experiment with QIP. This approach has carried the field to a complexity of about 10 qubits, a small number for quantum computation but large enough for observing and better understanding the complexity of the quantum world. While liquid state NMR is the only present-day technology about to reach this number of qubits, further increases in complexity will require new methods. We sketch one direction leading towards a scalable quantum computer using spin 1/2 particles. The next step of which is a solid state NMR-based QIP capable of reaching 10—30 qubits.