Cloud Quantum Computing of an Atomic Nucleus
Eugene Dumitrescu, Alex McCaskey, G. Hagen, G. R. Jansen, Titus Morris, T. Papenbrock, Raphael C. Pooser, David J. Dean, Pavel Lougovski · Physical Review Letters · 2018
We report a quantum simulation of the deuteron binding energy on quantum processors accessed via cloud servers. We use a Hamiltonian from pionless effective field theory at leading order. We design a low-depth version of the unitary coupled-cluster ansatz, use the variational quantum eigensolver algorithm, and compute the binding energy to within a few percent. Our work is the first step towards scalable nuclear structure computations on a quantum processor via the cloud, and it sheds light on how to map scientific computing applications onto nascent quantum devices.