We investigate the quantum computing of the vibrational dynamics of CO$_2$ and H$_2$O by constructing the vibrational third-order anharmonic Hamiltonian in qubit and qudit form by two types of qubit encodings (binary and direct) and a qudit encoding. We simulate the time-dependent vibrational population transfer using the three different encodings, including the effect of noise and find that the qudit encoding leads to the most accurate results both for CO$_2$ and H$_2$O because of the small number of terms in the qudit Hamiltonian as long as the same values of the entangling gate error rates are adopted. Although the entangling gate errors of current qudit quantum computers are approximately one order of magnitude larger than the entangling gate errors of current qubit quantum computers, our results suggest that the simulation of vibrational dynamics is a promising application for future qudit quantum computers.
We investigate the quantum computing of the vibrational dynamics of CO2 and H2O by constructing the vibrational third-order anharmonic Hamiltonian in qubit and qudit form by two types of qubit encodings (binary and direct) and a qudit encoding. We simulate the time-dependent vibrational population transfer using the three different encodings, including the effect of noise and find that the qudit encoding leads to the most accurate results both for CO2 and H2O because of the small number of terms in the qudit Hamiltonian as long as the same values of the entangling gate error rates are adopted. Although the entangling gate errors of current qudit quantum computers are approximately one order of magnitude larger than the entangling gate errors of current qubit quantum computers, our results suggest that the simulation of vibrational dynamics is a promising application for future qudit quantum computers.
Simulating vibrational dynamics is essential for understanding molecular structure, unlocking useful applications such as vibrational spectroscopy for high-fidelity chemical detection. Quantum algorithms for vibrational dynamics are emerging as a promising alternative to resource-demanding classical approaches, but this domain is largely underdeveloped compared with quantum simulations of electronic structure. In this work, we describe in detail three distinct forms of the vibrational Hamiltonian: canonical bosonic quantization, real space representation, and the Christiansen second-quantized form. Leveraging the Lie algebraic properties of each, we develop efficient fragmentation schemes to enable the use of Trotter product formulas for simulating time evolution. We introduce circuits required to implement time evolution in each form and highlight factors that contribute to the simulation cost, including the choice of vibrational coordinates. Using a perturbative approach for the Trotter error, we obtain tight estimates of the T gate cost for the simulation of time evolution in each form, enabling their quantitative comparison. Combining tight Trotter error estimates and efficient fragmentation schemes, we find that for the CH 4 molecule with 9 vibrational modes, time evolution for approximately 1.8 ps may be simulated using as few as 36 qubits and approximately 3 × 10 8 T gates─an order-of-magnitude speedup over state-of-the-art algorithms. Finally, we present calculations of vibrational spectra using each form to demonstrate the fidelity of our algorithms. This work presents a unified and highly optimized framework that makes simulating vibrational dynamics an attractive use case for quantum computers.
Molecular quantum dynamics simulations that treat both electrons and nuclei quantum mechanically are crucial for predicting chemical reactions. With classical computation, a full wave-function representation of both types of particles requires resources that grow exponentially with their number. Oscillator-qubit processors, including trapped-ion and circuit QED devices, represent electronic states with qubits and nuclear vibrations with oscillators. Their native operations produce linear vibronic interactions, from which programmable anharmonic interactions can be built. Product-formula approaches build the corresponding phase gates by repeating small noncommuting phase steps, and quantum signal processing (QSP) approaches approximate each gate directly with a Fourier series. Simulations apply many such gates in sequence, so accumulated cost and error limit how long the dynamics can be followed. We propose near-optimal quantum primitives for molecular quantum dynamics simulation, covering the representations of both types of particles and their interactions. We synthesize nonlinear and multimode bosonic phase gates using generalized Jacobi-Anger (GJA) expansions within QSP, with a cost that grows near-optimally in both interaction strength and precision. Our interaction model and gate synthesis each have their own accuracy setting. Chosen together, these settings make our multimode benchmark circuits about one-third shorter than those of the previous direct QSP approach. We then simulate energy exchange between the stretching and bending vibrations of a simplified carbon dioxide model. With circuit-QED noise, a short simulation narrowly misses our accuracy criteria at qubit and oscillator lifetimes near 2 ms and 5 ms. These lifetimes mark a concrete checkpoint on the way to simulating anharmonic multimode molecular quantum dynamics on near-term oscillator-qubit processors.
Simulating chemical dynamics is computationally challenging, especially for nonadiabatic dynamics, where numerically exact classical simulations scale exponentially with system size, becoming intractable for even small molecules. On quantum computers, chemical dynamics can be simulated efficiently using either universal, qubit-only devices or specialized mixed-qudit-boson (MQB) simulators, which natively host electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom. Here, we compare the quantum resources required for a qubit-only approach to achieve the same accuracy as an MQB device at simulating nonadiabatic molecular dynamics. We find that MQB simulations require orders-of-magnitude fewer quantum operations than qubit-only simulations, with a one-gate MQB circuit requiring a qubit-equivalent circuit volume of over 400,000 when simulating an isolated molecule, which increases to over ten million when environmental effects are included. These estimates assume perfect qubits and gates, and would increase by additional orders of magnitude if error correction were used for fault tolerance. When errors are small, the advantage of MQB simulators becomes even larger as system size increases. Our results highlight the enormous resource advantages of representing non-qubit chemical degrees of freedom natively, rather than encoding them into qubits.
Quantum computation of vibrational properties of molecules is a promising platform to obtain computational advantages for computational chemistry. However, fault-tolerant quantum computations of vibrational properties remain a relatively unexplored field in quantum computing. In this work, we present different algorithms for efficient encodings of vibrational Hamiltonians using qubitization. Specifically, we investigate different encoding representations, high-order tensor decomposition to obtain low rank approximations for the vibrational Hamiltonian, rectilinear, and polyspherical coordinate systems, parallelization, and grouping algorithms. To investigate the performance of the different methods, we perform benchmark computations for both small and large molecules with more than one hundred vibrational modes with two- and three-mode coupled Hamiltonian. We present the first resource estimates for qubitization using multimode vibrational Hamiltonians with 1 cm –1 spectral resolution for molecules with up to one hundred vibrational modes. Additionally, we show that tensor decomposition and operator parallelization effectively reduce the T gate depth of the quantum algorithm.
We apply a modified version of the multistate contracted variational quantum eigensolver method to calculate vibrational eigenstates of CO2 on a quantum computer. A two-mode model of CO2 is employed, and the vibrational wave function is expanded using three harmonic-oscillator basis functions for each mode. The wave functions are mapped to four qubits by a compact mapping method. The Hamiltonian matrix elements are evaluated on a simulator including noise and on a quantum computer available at IBM Quantum, while the Hamiltonian matrix is diagonalized on a classical computer. We propose an error mitigation method by which the shift of the numerical values of the matrix elements originating from the noise can be corrected, and examine the dependence of the statistical uncertainties on the number of executions of each quantum circuit. We find that, at about $8\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{6}$ executions, the energy eigenvalues of the Fermi resonance states in CO2 can be obtained with an uncertainty within 1 ${\mathrm{cm}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$.
Bosonic quantum devices, which utilize harmonic oscillator modes to encode information, are emerging as a promising alternative to conventional qubit-based quantum devices, especially for the simulation of vibrational dynamics and spectroscopy. We present a framework for digital quantum simulation of vibrational dynamics under anharmonic potentials on these bosonic devices. In our approach, the vibrational Hamiltonian is decomposed into solvable fragments that can be used for Hamiltonian simulation on currently available bosonic hardware. Specifically, we have extended the Cartan subalgebra approach [Yen, T.C.; Izmaylov, A. F. PRX Quantum 2, 2021; 040320]− a method for decomposing quantum Hamiltonians into solvable parts− to bosonic operators, enabling us to construct anharmonic Hamiltonian fragments that can be efficiently diagonalized using Bogoliubov transforms. The approach is tested using a simulation of tunneling dynamics in a model two-dimensional double-well potential and calculations of vibrational eigenenergies for small molecules. Our fragmentation scheme provides a new approach for digital quantum simulations on bosonic quantum hardware for multimode anharmonic vibrational dynamics.