Quantum Information and Nuclear Physics

Z. Máté

Ian C. Cloët, Matthew Dietrich, Arrington, John +23 more

This whitepaper is an outcome of the workshop Intersections between Nuclear Physics and Quantum Information held at Argonne National Laboratory on 28-30 March 2018 [www.phy.anl.gov/npqi2018/]. The workshop brought together 116 national and international experts in nuclear physics and quantum information science to explore opportunities for the two fields to collaborate on topics of interest to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, and more broadly to U.S. society and industry. The workshop consisted of 22 invited and 10 contributed talks, as well as three panel discussion sessions. Topics discussed included quantum computation, quantum simulation, quantum sensing, nuclear physics detectors, nuclear many-body problem, entanglement at collider energies, and lattice gauge theories.

Dong Bai

Nuclear entanglement is a flagship in the interdisciplinary direction of nuclear physics and quantum information science. Spin entanglement, a special kind of nuclear entanglement, is ubiquitous in nuclear structures and dynamics. Based on the idea of quantum state tomography, the problem of experimental determination of spin entanglement of two-nucleon pure states is studied directly within the scope of nuclear physics. It is shown that the amount of spin entanglement can be obtained by measuring three spin polarizations of one nucleon in polarization experiments. The errors from imperfect preparation of nucleon pairs are also analyzed. This work not only complements the existing literature of nuclear entanglement but also provides new opportunities for nuclear physics with polarized particles.

Erika Andersson

Jincheng Zhang

The conventional description of the atomic nucleus relies heavily on the spatial distribution of nucleons, expressed by the nuclear density function ρ(r). While ρ(r) captures the average position of nucleons, it neglects the intrinsic quantum correlations that arise from the many-body wave function. In this paper, we introduce the Nuclear Information Density Spectrum (NIDS), a formalism that supplements the conventional density with an information density I(r), defined in terms of the local reduced density matrix and an entropic functional. I(r) quantifies the amount of quantum information and correlation present at each point inside the nucleus. We develop the mathematical foundations of NIDS, derive its properties, and discuss its implications for nuclear structure and scattering processes. By integrating NIDS into the analysis of scattering data, we demonstrate that it provides a more nuanced understanding of nuclear dynamics, potentially opening new avenues for precision tests of nuclear models and a deeper appreciation of the underlying quantum many-body physics.

A. Obertelli, Hiroyuki Sagawa