Toward scalable quantum computations of atomic nuclei

Journal Article · Thu Jan 22 00:00:00 EST 2026 · Physical Review C

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/gqdy-dvps· OSTI ID:3014417

Gu, Chenyi; Heinz, Matthias; Kiss, Oriel; Papenbrock, Thomas

We solve the nuclear two-body and three-body bound states via quantum simulations of pionless effective field theory on a lattice in position space. While the employed lattice remains small, the usage of local Hamiltonians including two- and three-body forces ensures that the number of Pauli terms scales linearly with increasing numbers of lattice sites. We use an adaptive ansatz grown from unitary coupled cluster theory to parametrize the ground states of the deuteron and 3He, compute their corresponding energies, and analyze the scaling of the required computational resources. Our quantum simulations reproduce exact benchmarks for 2H and 3He within 100 keV, requiring at most 30 layers in the ansatz and thus resulting in modest circuit depths. Additionally, we find the number of shots required to reach a given precision scales linearly in the lattice size and more mildly in the system size. Based on the agreement with exact benchmarks and mild scaling, we conclude that this can be an efficient, scalable approach for quantum computations of nuclear ground states, particularly to prepare initial states for quantum phase estimation or other filtering algorithms.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States); The University of Tennessee
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Nuclear Physics (NP)
• Grant/Contract Number: SC0021642
• OSTI ID: 3014417
• Journal Information: Physical Review C, Journal Name: Physical Review C; ISSN 2469-9985; ISSN 2469-9993
• Publisher: American Physical Society (APS)
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS
Nuclear structure
light nuclei
quantum computing