Quantum simulation of quantum field theories offers a new way to investigate properties of the fundamental constituents of matter. We develop quantum simulation algorithms based on the light-front formulation of relativistic field theories. The process of quantizing the system in light-cone coordinates will be explained for a Hamiltonian formulation, which becomes block diagonal, each block approximating the Fock space with a certain harmonic resolution K. We analyze a QCD theory in 2+1D. We compute the analogue of parton distribution functions, the generalized parton distribution functions for mesonic composite particles, like hadrons, in these theories. The dependence of such analyses on the scaling of the number of qubits is compared with other schemes and conventional computations. There is a notable advantage to the light-front formulation.
We describe methods for simulating general second-quantized Hamiltonians using the compact encoding, in which qubit states encode only the occupied modes in physical occupation number basis states. These methods apply to second-quantized Hamiltonians composed of a constant number of interactions, i.e., linear combinations of ladder operator monomials of fixed form. Compact encoding leads to qubit requirements that are optimal up to logarithmic factors. We show how to use sparse Hamiltonian simulation methods for second-quantized Hamiltonians in compact encoding, give explicit implementations for the required oracles, and analyze the methods. We also describe several example applications including the free boson and fermion theories, the ${\ensuremath{\phi}}^{4}$-theory, and the massive Yukawa model, all in both equal-time and light-front quantization. Our methods provide a general-purpose tool for simulating second-quantized Hamiltonians, with optimal or near-optimal scaling with error and model parameters.
A general system composed of many weakly interacting bosons and/or fermions is considered. The object is to develop a procedure for renormalizing the single-particle creation operators, so as to remove the interactions to successively higher orders of perturbation. The basic idea is that creation operators ${{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}$ must satisfy the Hamiltonian commutator equations $[\mathcal{H},{{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}]={\ensuremath{\omega}}_{i}{{\ensuremath{\theta}}_{i}}^{\ifmmode\dagger\else\textdagger\fi{}}$, where
H is the Hamiltonian and ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{i}$ are the particle energies. For the many-weakly-interacting-particle system, the zeroth-order boson and fermion creation operators satisfy these equations to zeroth order. It is shown that if the creation operators are renormalized so as to satisfy the Hamiltonian commutator equations to order
m, and also to satisfy the appropriate boson commutators and fermion anticommutators to order
m, then the problem is solved to order
m. In particular, the vectors formed by operating on the ground state with the renormalized creation operators, according to the usual boson and fermion occupation-number representation, are eigenvectors of
H and are orthonormal, all to order
m. A procedure is otained for finding the (
m+1)-order contributions to the particle creation energies, in terms of the
m-order operators. Explicit first-order calculations of these general results are provided for a system of bosons and a system of fermions, and these first-order results are shown to include similar results of Rayleigh-Schr\"odinger perturbation theory, the random-phase approximation, and the method of thermodynamic Green's functions. The problem of anharmonic lattice dynamics is studied in detail, and a method of undetermined coefficients is used to renormalize the phonon creation operators to first order. The phonon energies are calculated to second order, and this calculation shows that the interactions between renormalized phonons cannot be removed in second order. Statistical averages of the phonon energies give the energy shifts and lifetimes which have been calculated previously by various propagator techniques. In addition, the renormalized energies are used to calculate the temperature-dependent part of the Helmholtz free energy correct to second order. As a final example, electron-phonon interactions in a normal metal are studied. The electron and phonon creation operators are renormalized to first order, the particle energies are calculated to second order, and statistical averages of the particle energies recover the usual thermodynamic Green's-function results for energy shifts and lifetimes. These examples show the simplicity by which the renormalization procedure obtains a great amount of detailed information about the single-particle nature of a many-particle system.
One of the useful and practical methods for solving quantum-mechanical many-body systems is to recast the full problem into a form of the effective interaction acting within a model space of tractable size. Many of the effective-interaction theories in nuclear physics have been formulated by use of the so-called $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{Q}$ box introduced by Kuo et al. It has been one of the central problems how to calculate the $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{Q}$ box accurately and efficiently. We first show that, introducing new basis states, the Hamiltonian is transformed to a block-tridiagonal form in terms of submatrices with small dimension. With this transformed Hamiltonian, we next prove that the $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{Q}$ box can be expressed in two ways: One is in the form of a continued fraction and the other is a simple series expansion up to second order with respect to renormalized vertices and propagators. This procedure ensures derivation of an exact $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{Q}$ box, if the calculation converges as the dimension of the Hilbert space tends to infinity. The $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{Q}$ box given in this study corresponds to a nonperturbative solution for the energy-dependent effective interaction which is often referred to as the Bloch-Horowitz or the Feshbach form. By applying the $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{Z}$-box approach based on the $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{Q}$ box proposed previously, we introduce a graphical method for solving the eigenvalue problem of the Hamiltonian. The present approach has a possibility of resolving many of the difficulties encountered in the effective-interaction theory.
Trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and circuit QED quantum computers naturally enable coupled qubit-boson simulations. Boson-fermion interactions arise in quantum field theory, where renormalization is required to obtain finite results. We study one of the simplest examples of a coupled fermion-boson system, the static Yukawa model, on the QSCOUT trapped-ion system. We use similarity renormalization to express the same physics in terms of effective particles described by different values of the renormalization parameter
s. This enables us to map data taken in the window of bosonic occupancy that is experimentally accessible to larger occupancies of distinct effective particles. We use this to study strongly coupled, high-occupancy regimes despite limited readout ranges. Using a trapped-ion qubit-boson device on Sandia National Laboratories' QSCOUT platform, we demonstrate the time evolution of the static Yukawa model.
We have compared different strategies for ab initio quantum chemistry density matrix renormalization group treatments. The two starting orbital blocks include all valence and active orbitals of the reference complete active space self consistent field wave function. To generate the remaining blocks, we propose following the order of the contributions to the correlation energy: a posteriori using approximate occupation numbers or a priori, using a Møller–Plesset type of arguments, by explicit evaluation of second-order interactions. We have compared two different schemes for orbital localization to identify the important and less important orbital interactions and simplify the generation of the orbital blocks. To truncate the expansion we have compared two approaches, keeping constant the number m of components or the threshold λ to fix the residue of the expansion at each step. The extrapolation of the energies is found to provide accurate estimates of the full configuration interaction energy, making the expansion independent on the actual values of the two parameters m and λ. We propose to generate the factors for the two blocks from ground and excited eigenvectors of the Hamiltonian matrix.