This report results from a contract tasking Moscow State University as follows: Exploration of methods to control the radiative gamma- processes in nuclei is currently one of the most promising investigation directions of the modern Quantum Nucleonics - a new realm of contemporary Physics which spreads the basic conceptual ideas and methods of optical Quantum Electronics of atoms and molecules to the gamma-ray range and atomic nuclei and even anti-particles. One of the most important problems in this field is the generation of coherent gamma-radiation by a Gamma-ray Lasing (GRL) process which makes use of excited nuclei as an amplifying medium. The most likely medium for gamma-ray lasers is an ensemble of metastable nuclear isomers, Direct excitation of these isomeric states by electrons or X-ray photons will also create a deeper understanding of nuclear structure and properties.
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
32Mg and
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
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.
Due to the idea of atomism, there were discovered atoms, nucleons, and electrons. The atomic theory incorporated seeds of the idea of infinite divisibility of matter aimed at perceiving the structure of the entire material world. The next step in that perceiving should have been the recognition of ether discovered in Fizeau’s experiment. However, physicists did not recognize the discovery. The neglect of ether in physical theories resulted in physicists’ failure to use the methods of “classic”, Newtonian physics to gain a detailed understanding of atomic structure, and to build a “classic” microworld theory. As consequence, there emerged the quantum hypothesis that became a basis for the quantum physics of microworld. As the quantum hypothesis appeared to be in irreconcilable contradiction with the idea of infinite divisibility of matter, because of the neglect of ether, the quantum physics failed to understand the real structure of electrons and nucleons, even though all the necessary and ample experimental facts there had been obtained on microobject accelerators. Instead of objective ideas of the structure of electrons and nucleons or further development of knowledge regarding the structure of matter, there appeared fake concepts of quarks, myons, pions, bosons, etc., that do not exist in the real material world Experimental evidence as to the lack of indivisible quanta in nature [1] seemed to have fixed the intolerable situation but quantum physicists did not “notice” that.