Abstract This study presents a simulated quantum computing approach for the investigation into the shell-model energy levels of58Ni through the application of the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) method in combination with a problem-specific ansatz. The primary objective is to achieve a fully accurate low-lying energy spectrum of58Ni. The chosen isotope,58Ni is particularly interesting in nuclear physics through its role in astrophysical reactions while also being a simple but non-trivial nucleus for shell-model study, it being two particles outside a closed shell. Our ansatz, along with the VQE method are shown to be able to reproduce exact energy values for the ground state and first and second excited states. We compare a classical shell model code, the values obtained by diagonalization of the Hamiltonian after qubit mapping, and a noiseless simulated ansatz+VQE simulation. The exact agreement between classical and qubit-mapped diagonalization shows the correctness of our method, and the high accuracy of the simulation means that the ansatz is suitable to allow a full reconstruction of the full nuclear wave function.
Abstract This study presents a simulated quantum computing approach for the investigation into the shell-model energy levels of58Ni through the application of the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) method in combination with a problem-specific ansatz. The primary objective is to achieve a fully accurate low-lying energy spectrum of58Ni. The chosen isotope,58Ni is particularly interesting in nuclear physics through its role in astrophysical reactions while also being a simple but non-trivial nucleus for shell-model study, it being two particles outside a closed shell. Our ansatz, along with the VQE method are shown to be able to reproduce exact energy values for the ground state and first and second excited states. We compare a classical shell model code, the values obtained by diagonalization of the Hamiltonian after qubit mapping, and a noiseless simulated ansatz+VQE simulation. The exact agreement between classical and qubit-mapped diagonalization shows the correctness of our method, and the high accuracy of the simulation means that the ansatz is suitable to allow a full reconstruction of the full nuclear wave function.
Variational Quantum Eigensolvers (VQEs) have become a standard tool for use in preparing eigenstates in quantum simulations of many-body systems. In the case of the nuclear shell model, various adaptations of the VQE have been shown to be able to produce ground and excited states of nuclei. The VQE algorithm works by seeking minima in a cost function, which is often the expectation value of the energy. For a well-formulated problem, symmetries that are respected by the Hamiltonian should appear in the final converged solution provided by the VQE, even if those symmetries are broken by the wave function ansatz. We demonstrate explicit appearance of the particle–hole symmetry, and explicit recovery of angular momentum conservation due to rotational symmetry, during VQE runs in the case of the nuclear shell model. We conduct analyses of how the symmetry convergence appears in different ansatz formulations, and suggest that information obtained could be used in future VQE design.
Some of the computational limitations in solving the nuclear many-body problem could be overcome by utilizing quantum computers. The nuclear shell-model calculations providing deeper insights into the properties of atomic nuclei, is one such case with high demand for resources as the size of the Hilbert space grows exponentially with the number of particles involved. Quantum algorithms are being developed to overcome these challenges and advance such calculations. To develop quantum circuits for the nuclear shell-model, leveraging the capabilities of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. We aim to minimize resource requirements (specifically in terms of qubits and gates) and strive to reduce the impact of noise by employing relevant mitigation techniques. We achieve noise resilience by designing an optimized ansatz for the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) based on Givens rotations and incorporating qubit-ADAPT-VQE in combination with variational quantum deflation (VQD) to compute ground and excited states incorporating the zero-noise extrapolation mitigation technique. Furthermore, the qubit requirements are significantly reduced by mapping the basis states to qubits using Gray code encoding and generalizing transformations of fermionic operators to efficiently represent manybody states. By employing the noise-resilient protocols, we achieve the ground and excited state energy levels of 38Ar and 6Li with better accuracy. These energy levels are presented for noiseless simulations, noisy conditions, and after applying noise mitigation techniques. Results are compared for Jordan Wigner and Gray code encoding using VQE, qubit-ADAPT-VQE, and VQD. Our work highlights the potential of noise-resilient protocols to leverage the full potential of NISQ devices in scaling the nuclear shell model calculations.
The nuclear shell model is a general way of expressing the many-body nuclear Hamiltonian and deciphering the underlying nuclear structure. In today's era of modern and high-power computation, the primary limitation of the nuclear shell model is the enormous dimensionality of its Hilbert space, which far exceeds available storage capacity and prevents the diagonalization of the full Hamiltonian matrix in that space. Quantum computing offers a scalable solution to bypass this curse of dimensionality. In this work, we introduce a single-run quantum simulation capable of obtaining multiple shell-model eigenstates simultaneously. The nuclear Hamiltonian is transformed from a bit to a qubit basis using the Jordan-Wigner transformation, explicitly preserving fermionic anti-commutation. We employ a Subspace Search Variational Quantum Eigensolver (SSVQE) along with an Adaptive Derivative-Assembled Pseudo-Trotter (ADAPT) ansatz to construct the quantum circuit required to solve the shell-model problem. The ADAPT-SSVQE algorithm uses a symmetry-preserving single and double-excitation operator pool and optimizes a weighted energy sum to obtain the simultaneous convergence of all eigenstates within a targeted MJ subspace, eliminating the need for post-processing efforts to extract excited spectra. We benchmark this approach by solving the problem for two and three identical nucleons in a j = 9/2 orbital, successfully extracting five and ten mutually orthogonal states, respectively, within a 10-qubit active space. The algorithm achieves spectroscopic accuracy, in simulation, relative to exact diagonalization and intrinsically restores total angular momentum (\hat{J}^2) symmetry.
Quantum computing of the 6Li nucleus via ordered unitary coupled cluster
The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is an algorithm to compute ground and excited state energy of quantum many-body systems. A key component of the algorithm and an active research area is the construction of a parametrized trial wave function—a so-called variational ansatz. The wave function parametrization should be expressive enough, i.e., represent the true eigenstate of a quantum system for some choice of parameter values. On the other hand, it should be trainable, i.e., the number of parameters should not grow exponentially with the size of the system. Here, we apply VQE to the problem of finding ground and excited state energies of the odd-odd nucleus Li6 . We study the effects of ordering fermionic excitation operators in the unitary coupled clusters ansatz on the VQE algorithm convergence by using only operators preserving the Jz quantum number. The accuracy is improved by two orders of magnitude in the case of descending order. We first compute optimal ansatz parameter values using a classical state-vector simulator with arbitrary measurement accuracy and then use those values to evaluate energy eigenstates of Li6 on a superconducting quantum chip from IBM. We post-process the results by using error mitigation techniques and are able to reproduce the exact energy with an error of 3.8% and 0.1% for the ground state and for the first excited state of Li6 , respectively.
Quantum computing offers a scalable approach to solving the nuclear shell model, a highly complex and exponentially scaled many-body problem. This work presents a numerical simulation of the subspace search variational quantum eigensolver (SSVQE) combined with an adaptive derivative-assembles pseudo-trotter (ADAPT) ansatz to obtain the low-lying states of any nuclear system in a single optimization run. As an example, we apply this method in this work to a trivial identical nucleon system, two nucleons in the 0p3/2 orbital, mapped to 4 qubits depicting m-scheme single-particle states including a surface delta effective interaction using the Jordan-Wigner transformation. The ADAPT-SSVQE algorithm, by utilizing a symmetry-preserving double-excitation ADAPT operator pool, uniquely optimizes a weighted energy sum, forcing the simultaneous convergence of two lowest states within the total angular momentum MJ=0 subspace. We demonstrate the accuracy of the method by benchmarking against the exact diagonalization, confirming its potential for probing nuclear structure and pairing phenomena on current and near-future quantum devices without requiring multi-step procedure for excited states.
Abstract In this work, we introduce a new qubit mapping strategy for the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) applied to nuclear shell model calculations, where each Slater Determinant (SD) is mapped to a qubit, rather than assigning qubits to individual single-particle states. While this approach may increase the total number of qubits required in some cases, it enables the construction of simpler quantum circuits that are more compatible with current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. We apply this method to seven nuclei: Four lithium isotopes 6−9 Li from the p -shell, 18 F from the sd -shell, and two heavier nuclei ( 210 Po, and 210 Pb). We run circuits representing their ground states on a noisy simulator (IBM’s FakeFez backend) and quantum hardware ( ibm_pittsburgh ). For heavier nuclei, we demonstrate the feasibility of simulating 210 Po and 210 Pb as 22- and 29-qubit systems, respectively. Additionally, we employ Zero-Noise Extrapolation (ZNE) via two-qubit gate folding to mitigate errors in both simulated and hardware-executed results. Post-mitigation, the best results show less than 4 % deviation from shell model binding energy predictions across all nuclei studied. This SD-based qubit mapping proves particularly effective for lighter nuclei and two-nucleon systems, offering a promising route for near-term quantum simulations in nuclear physics.