arXiv:2511.10124
First and second quantized digital quantum simulations of bosonic systems
Mathias Mikkelsen, Hubert Okadome Valencia
Abstract
We compare the basic resource requirements for first and second quantized bosonic mappings in a system consisting of $N$ particles in $M$ modes. In addition to the standard binary first quantized mapping, we investigate the unary first quantized mapping. Our comparison focuses on the $k$-body reduced density matrix ($k$-RDM) and two standard bosonic Hamiltonians. The first quantized mappings use less resources for off-diagonal terms of the $k$-RDM by a factor of $ \sim N^k$, compared to the second quantized mappings. The number of gates for the first quantized binary mapping increases faster with $M$ compared to the other mappings. Nevertheless, a detailed numeric analysis reveals that the binary first quantized mapping still requires fewer gates than the binary and unary second quantized ones for realistic combinations of $N$ and $M$, while requiring exponentially fewer qubits than the unary mappings. Additionally, the number of CNOT and $R_z(φ)$ gates necessary to express a single Trotter step of the Hamiltonian in the binary first quantized mapping is comparable to the (most efficient for a single Trotter step) unary first quantized one when $M = 2^n$ for both the Bose-Hubbard model and the harmonic trap with short-range interactions. Additionally the binary mapping leads to lower one-norms than the unary mapping making it the overall most efficient choice for qubitization-based quantum phase estimation.
- Comments
- 14 pages, 7 figures (updated version which included a trotter error analysis and a 1-norm comparison for the BHM and HO hamiltonians in order to better quantify total resource usage, as well as a variety of minor fixes)