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arXiv:2510.10118 · Physics Letters B

Quasiparticle pairing encoding of atomic nuclei for quantum annealing

Emanuele Costa, Axel Pérez-Obiol, J. Menéndez, Arnau Rios, Artur García-Sáez, Bruno Juliá-Díaz

Published Nov 30, 2025• 5 citations
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Abstract

Quantum computing is emerging as a promising tool in nuclear physics. However, the cost of encoding fermionic operators hampers the application of algorithms in current noisy quantum devices. In this work, we analyze an encoding scheme based on pairing nucleon modes. This approach significantly reduces the complexity of the encoding, while maintaining a high accuracy for the ground states of semimagic nuclei across the sd and pf shells and for tin isotopes. In addition, we also explore the encoding ability to describe open-shell nuclei within the above configuration spaces. When this scheme is applied to a trotterized quantum adiabatic evolution, our results demonstrate a computational advantage of up to three orders of magnitude in CNOT gate count compared to the standard Jordan-Wigner encoding. Our approach paves the way for efficient quantum simulations of nuclear structure using quantum annealing, with applications to both digital and hybrid quantum computing platforms.

DOI
10.1016/j.physletb.2025.140042

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Quantum computing is emerging as a promising tool in nuclear physics. However, the cost of encoding fermionic operators hampers the application of algorithms in current noisy quantum devices. In this work, we analyze an encoding scheme based on pairing nucleon modes. This approach significantly reduces the complexity of the encoding, while maintaining a high accuracy for the ground states of semimagic nuclei across the sd and pf shells and for tin isotopes. In addition, we also explore the encoding ability to describe open-shell nuclei within the above configuration spaces. When this scheme is applied to a trotterized quantum adiabatic evolution, our results demonstrate a computational advantage of up to three orders of magnitude in CNOT gate count compared to the standard Jordan-Wigner encoding. Our approach paves the way for efficient quantum simulations of nuclear structure using quantum annealing, with applications to both digital and hybrid quantum computing platforms.
Quantum computing is increasingly offering concrete solutions toward the simulation of nuclear structure, with the potential to overcome the exponential scaling that limits classical diagonalization methods in large spaces. A particularly efficient encoding scheme, based on collective like-nucleon pairing modes, reduces the qubit requirements by half and avoids the non-local operator strings of standard fermion-to-qubit mappings. While this quasiparticle framework provides accurate results for semimagic nuclei, it does not adequately describe open-shell systems where proton-neutron correlations become important. In this work, we apply Brillouin-Wigner perturbation theory to systematically improve the quasiparticle description of open-shell nuclei in the sdsdsd shell, reaching an energy relative error below 0.2%0.2\%0.2% compared to the nuclear shell model. Furthermore, to make the effective Hamiltonian suitable for quantum simulation, we introduce a mean-field Hartree-Fock approximation of the non-quasiparticle resolvent, achieving ground-state energies typically within 2%2\%2% of the exact shell-model result. This represents a systematic improvement over the bare quasiparticle Hamiltonian while remaining within the reach of near-term quantum devices.
The nuclear shell model is one of the prime many-body methods to study the structure of atomic nuclei, but it is hampered by an exponential scaling on the basis size as the number of particles increases. We present a shell-model quantum circuit design strategy to find nuclear ground states by exploiting an adaptive variational quantum eigensolver algorithm. Our circuit implementation is in excellent agreement with classical shell-model simulations for a dozen of light and medium-mass nuclei, including neon and calcium isotopes. We quantify the circuit depth, width and number of gates to encode realistic shell-model wavefunctions. Our strategy also addresses explicitly energy measurements and the required number of circuits to perform them. Our simulated circuits approach the benchmark results exponentially with a polynomial scaling in quantum resources for each nucleus. This work paves the way for quantum computing shell-model studies across the nuclear chart and our quantum resource quantification may be used in configuration-interaction calculations of other fermionic systems.
The nuclear shell model accurately describes the structure and dynamics of atomic nuclei. However, the exponential scaling of the basis size with the number of degrees of freedom hampers a direct numerical solution for heavy nuclei. In this work, we present a quantum annealing protocol to obtain nuclear ground states. We propose a tailored driver Hamiltonian that preserves a large gap and validate our approach in a dozen nuclei with basis sizes up to 10^5 10 5 using classical simulations of the annealing evolution. We explore the relation between the spectral gap and the total time of the annealing protocol, assessing its accuracy by comparing the fidelity and energy relative error to classical benchmarks. While the nuclear Hamiltonian is non-local and thus challenging to implement in current setups, the estimated computational cost of our annealing protocol on quantum circuits is polynomial in the single-particle basis size, paving the way to study heavier nuclei.
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.
We demonstrate quantum simulations of strongly correlated nuclear many-body systems on the RIKEN-Quantinuum Reimei trapped-ion quantum computer, targeting ground states of oxygen, calcium, and nickel isotopes. By combining a hard-core-boson representation of the nuclear shell model with a pair-unitary coupled-cluster doubles ansatz, we achieve subpercent relative error in the ground-state energies compared to noise-free state vector simulations. Our approach leverages symmetry-aware state preparation and particle-number postselection to efficiently capture pairing correlations characteristic of systems with same-species nucleons. These findings highlight the viability of high-fidelity trapped-ion platforms for nuclear physics applications and provide a foundation for scaling to more complex nuclear systems.
To maximize the value of fault-tolerant quantum computers, it is essential to develop concrete applications beyond well-established domains such as chemistry and condensed-matter physics. Here we construct and compile quantum algorithms to simulate the structure of atomic nuclei -- a topic that has received relatively little attention from the quantum computing community despite its similarities to the electronic structure problem in chemistry -- via effective shell-model Hamiltonians and no-core-shell-model Hamiltonians with three-body interactions derived from chiral effective field theory. Furthermore, we provide quantum resource estimates, in terms of Toffoli gate and qubit counts, for these algorithms, which, to our knowledge, are the first such estimates for fault-tolerant quantum simulation of atomic nuclei. Notably, the estimates for 32^{32}32Mg and 219^{219}219At shell-model Hamiltonians are comparable to recent estimates of Femoco simulations, a standard benchmark in chemistry. For no-core-shell-model Hamiltonians suitable for light nuclei (up to 40^{40}40Ca or so), we find that resource requirements are significantly higher, suggesting that more bespoke strategies are required to make such simulations practicable. Throughout this work, we draw upon the similarities between nuclear and electronic structure problems, while also highlighting challenges that are specific to the former. We hope this work will spur long-term collaborations between the nuclear and quantum computing community with the ultimate goal of realizing useful nuclear simulations on quantum computers.