Quantum simulation of nuclear Hamiltonian with a generalized transformation for Gray code encoding
Pooja Siwach, P. Arumugam
Abstract
We present the quantum simulation of the deuteron to calculate its binding energy using the variational quantum eigensolver, which is based on a hybrid quantum-classical approach. Apart from a commonly used Hamiltonian derived from pionless effective field theory, we consider the interaction which can be easily studied with conventional classical methods but the corresponding operator leading to nonzero off-tridiagonal matrix elements. To map the many-body basis states on the qubit states, three encodings are explored, namely, one-hot, Bravyi-Kitaev, and the Gray code. We perform a generalized transformation for many-body operators in Gray code encoding, and simulate the Hamiltonians with nonzero off-tridiagonal matrix elements. Furthermore, the analyses of the relative efficiency of all encodings and corresponding transformations are carried out using the noise model of a real IBM quantum device. We demonstrate that the Gray code is more efficient for a large basis, irrespective of the form of potential and the presence of hardware noise.