Solving Many-Body Problems on Quantum Computers

Stephen J. Wiesner

We suggest that quantum computers can solve quantum many-body problems that are impracticable to solve on a classical computer.

Adam G. D’Souza

James K. Freericks, Jeffrey Cohn, Khadijeh Najafi +1 more

Giuseppe Castagnoli

I provide an alternative way of seeing quantum computation. First, I describe an idealized classical problem solving machine that, thanks to a many body interaction, reversibly and nondeterministically produces the solution of the problem under the simultaneous influence of all the problem constraints. This requires a perfectly accurate, rigid, and reversible relation between the coordinates of the machine parts - the machine can be considered the many body generalization of another perfect machine, the bounching ball model of reversible computation. The mathematical description of the machine, as it is, is applicable to quantum problem solving, an extension of the quantum algorithms that comprises the physical representation of the problem-solution interdependence. The perfect relation between the coordinates of the machine parts is transferred to the populations of the reduced density operators of the parts of the computer register. The solution of the problem is reversibly and nondeterministically produced under the simultaneous influence of the state before measurement and the quantum principle. At the light of the present notion of simultaneous computation, the quantum speed up turns out to be "precognition" of the solution, namely the reduction of the initial ignorance of the solution due to backdating, to before running the algorithm, a time-symmetric part of the state vector reduction on the solution; as such, it is bounded by state vector reduction through an entropic inequality. PACS numbers: 03.67.Lx, 01.55.+b, 01.70.+w

Mario Rasetti, Elena Tagliati, Paolo Zanardi A +1 more

Denis Melanson

The field of quantum information has been a fast growing field of research in the last few decades. The reason for this development is the potentially immense power of quantum computers, capable of solving hard problems in a fraction of the time it would take a classical computer. Quantum annealers are a type of quantum computer that seek to solve computational problems by finding the ground state of a quantum system. This type of quantum computer has been implemented on a large scale using superconducting flux quantum bits, but the computational power is limited. One potential improvement to help in this context is the implementation of multi-body interactions between quantum bits. Many-body interactions would be useful in allowing quantum annealers to solve more complex problems that are relevant in various areas of quantum information and science and implementing quantum error correction. \n \nWe present a superconducting device that implements a strong and tunable in sign and magnitude three-body interaction between superconducting flux quantum bits. The circuit design proposed has vanishing two-body interactions and robustness against noise and parameter variations. This circuit behaves as an ideal computational basis ZZZ coupler in a simulated three-qubit quantum annealing experiment. These properties are confirmed by calculations based on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, a two-level spin model for the coupling circuit, and full numerical diagonalization. \n \nThe proposed circuit is based on already available technology and therefore could be readily implemented in the next generation of quantum annealing hardware. This work will be relevant for advanced quantum annealing protocols and future developments of high-order many-body interactions in quantum computers and simulators.