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arXiv:2512.11726

Qubits in second quantisation in fermionic simulators

Ahana Ghoshal, Carlos de Gois, Kiara Hansenne, Otfried Gühne, Hai-Chau Nguyen

quant-phSubmitted Dec 12, 2025• Announced Dec 15, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

Simulating many-body fermionic systems in conventional qubit-based quantum computers poses significant challenges due to the overheads associated with the encoding of fermionic statistics in qubits, leading to the proposal of native fermionic simulators as an alternative. While allowing for fermionic problems to be simulated efficiently, this class of fermionic simulators carries also specific constraints with them and poses other challenges unfamiliar to qubit systems. Here, we propose to pair fermionic modes to form a so-called qubit in second quantisation representation. This allows fermionic gates to be represented as rotations of these second quantised qubits, enabling adaptation of methods for qubit systems. As an application, we use this pairing scheme to represent the measurement of two- and four-point correlators in fermionic simulators with its native gates as a graph problem. Optimising measurement settings is then analysed with various analytical and algorithmic methods.

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9 pages, 5 figures

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Simulating many-body fermionic systems in conventional qubit-based quantum computers poses significant challenges due to the overheads associated with the encoding of fermionic statistics in qubits, leading to the proposal of native fermionic simulators as an alternative. While allowing for fermionic problems to be simulated efficiently, this class of fermionic simulators carries also specific constraints with them and poses other challenges unfamiliar to qubit systems. Here, we propose to pair fermionic modes to form a so-called qubit in second quantisation representation. This allows fermionic gates to be represented as rotations of these second quantised qubits, enabling adaptation of methods for qubit systems. As an application, we use this pairing scheme to represent the measurement of two- and four-point correlators in fermionic simulators with its native gates as a graph problem. Optimising measurement settings is then analysed with various analytical and algorithmic methods.
Simulating fermionic systems on a quantum computer requires representing fermionic states using qubits. The complexity of many simulation algorithms depends on the complexity of implementing rotations generated by fermionic creation-annihilation operators, and the space depends on the number of qubits used. While standard fermion encodings like Jordan-Wigner are space optimal for arbitrary fermionic systems, physical symmetries like particle conservation can reduce the number of physical configurations, allowing improved space complexity. Such space saving is only feasible if the gate overhead is small, suggesting a (quantum) data structures problem, wherein one would like to minimize space used to represent a fermionic state, while still enabling efficient rotations. We define a structure which naturally captures mappings from fermions to systems of qubits. We then instantiate it in two ways, giving rise to two new second-quantized fermion encodings of F fermions in M modes. An information theoretic minimum of I: = ⌈log₂ binom(M,F)⌉ qubits is required for such systems, a bound we nearly match over the entire parameter regime. 1) Our first construction uses I + o(I) qubits when F = o(M), and allows rotations generated by creation-annihilation operators in O(I) gates and O(log M log log M) depth. 2) Our second construction uses I + O(1) qubits when F = Θ(M), and allows rotations generated by creation-annihilation operators in O(I³) gates. In relation to comparable prior work, the first represents a polynomial improvement in both space and gate complexity (against Kirby et al. 2022), and the second represents an exponential improvement in gate complexity at the cost of only a constant number of additional qubits (against Harrison et al. or Shee et al. 2022), in the described parameter regimes.
Simulating fermionic systems on a quantum computer requires representing fermionic states using qubits. The complexity of many simulation algorithms depends on the complexity of implementing rotations generated by fermionic creation-annihilation operators, and the space depends on the number of qubits used. While standard fermion encodings like Jordan-Wigner are space optimal for arbitrary fermionic systems, physical symmetries like particle conservation can reduce the number of physical configurations, allowing improved space complexity. Such space saving is only feasible if the gate overhead is small, suggesting a (quantum) data structures problem, wherein one would like to minimize space used to represent a fermionic state, while still enabling efficient rotations. We define a structure which naturally captures mappings from fermions to systems of qubits. We then instantiate it in two ways, giving rise to two new second-quantized fermion encodings of FFF fermions in MMM modes. An information theoretic minimum of I:=⌈log⁡(MF)⌉\mathcal{I}:=\lceil\log \binom{M}{F}\rceilI:=⌈log(FM​)⌉ qubits is required for such systems, a bound we nearly match over the entire parameter regime. (1) Our first construction uses I+o(I)\mathcal I+o(\mathcal I)I+o(I) qubits when F=o(M)F=o(M)F=o(M), and allows rotations generated by creation-annihilation operators in O(I)O(\mathcal I)O(I) gates and O(log⁡Mlog⁡log⁡M)O(\log M \log \log M)O(logMloglogM) depth. (2) Our second construction uses I+O(1)\mathcal I+O(1)I+O(1) qubits when F=Θ(M)F=Θ(M)F=Θ(M), and allows rotations generated by creation-annihilation operators in O(I3)O(\mathcal I^3)O(I3) gates. In relation to comparable prior work, the first represents a polynomial improvement in both space and gate complexity (against Kirby et al. 2022), and the second represents an exponential improvement in gate complexity at the cost of only a constant number of additional qubits (against Harrison et al. or Shee et al. 2022), in the described parameter regimes.
Quantum simulation of the interactions of fermions and bosons - the fundamental particles of nature - is essential for modeling complex quantum systems in material science, chemistry and high-energy physics and has been proposed as a promising application of fermion-boson quantum computers, which overcome the overhead encountered in mapping fermions and bosons to qubits. However, compiling the simulation of specific fermion-boson Hamiltonians into the natively available fermion-boson gate set is challenging. In particular, the large local dimension of bosons renders matrix-based compilation methods, as used for qubits and in existing tools such as Bosonic Qiskit or OpenFermion, challenging. We overcome this issue by introducing a novel symbolic compiler based on matrix-free symbolic manipulation of second quantised Hamiltonians, which automates the decomposition of fermion-boson second quantized problems into qubit-boson instruction set architectures. This integration establishes a comprehensive pipeline for simulating quantum systems on emerging qubit-boson and fermion-boson hardware, paving the way for their large-scale usage.
We present a method for encoding second-quantized fermionic systems in qubits when the number of fermions is conserved, as in the electronic structure problem. When the number FFF of fermions is much smaller than the number MMM of modes, this symmetry reduces the number of information-theoretically required qubits from Θ(M)\Theta(M)Θ(M) to O(Flog⁡M)O(F\log M)O(FlogM). In this limit, our encoding requires O(F2log⁡4M)O(F^2\log^4 M)O(F2log4M) qubits, while encoded fermionic creation and annihilation operators have cost O(F2log⁡5M)O(F^2\log^5 M)O(F2log5M) in two-qubit gates. This is the first second-quantized encoding of fermions in qubits whose costs in qubits and gates are both polylogarithmic in MMM, which will permit studying fermionic systems in the high-precision regime of many modes.
Physical systems with strongly correlated electrons (fermions) are notoriously difficult to study using traditional computers. Meanwhile, as programmable $q\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}u\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}a\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}n\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}t\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}u\phantom{\rule{0}{0ex}}m$ computers become a reality, efficient (and preferably general) quantum algorithms are needed, in the face of limited qubit-qubit connectivity in the near term. Addressing both problems, the authors develop quantum algorithms that run on two-dimensional qubit lattices with nearest-neighbor interactions, to simulate strongly correlated fermions. Their approach avoids the parity problem in mapping fermionic operators to qubit operators, with hardly any overhead, and can be used for a whole class of problems.
Simulating the properties of many-body fermionic systems is an outstanding computational challenge relevant to material science, quantum chemistry, and particle physics.-5.4pc]Please note that the spelling of the following author names in the manuscript differs from the spelling provided in the article metadata: D. González-Cuadra, D. Bluvstein, M. Kalinowski, R. Kaubruegger, N. Maskara, P. Naldesi, T. V. Zache, A. M. Kaufman, M. D. Lukin, H. Pichler, B. Vermersch, Jun Ye, and P. Zoller. The spelling provided in the manuscript has been retained; please confirm. Although qubit-based quantum computers can potentially tackle this problem more efficiently than classical devices, encoding nonlocal fermionic statistics introduces an overhead in the required resources, limiting their applicability on near-term architectures. In this work, we present a fermionic quantum processor, where fermionic models are locally encoded in a fermionic register and simulated in a hardware-efficient manner using fermionic gates. We consider in particular fermionic atoms in programmable tweezer arrays and develop different protocols to implement nonlocal gates, guaranteeing Fermi statistics at the hardware level. We use this gate set, together with Rydberg-mediated interaction gates, to find efficient circuit decompositions for digital and variational quantum simulation algorithms, illustrated here for molecular energy estimation. Finally, we consider a combined fermion-qubit architecture, where both the motional and internal degrees of freedom of the atoms are harnessed to efficiently implement quantum phase estimation as well as to simulate lattice gauge theory dynamics.