Simulating nonnative cubic interactions on noisy quantum machines

Understand

As a milestone for general-purpose computing machines, we demonstrate that quantum processors can be programmed to efficiently simulate dynamics that are not native to the hardware.

• Moreover, on noisy devices without error correction, we show that simulation results are significantly improved when the quantum program is compiled using modular gates instead of a restricted set of standard gates.
• We demonstrate the general methodology by solving a cubic interaction problem, which appears in nonlinear optics, gauge theories, as well as plasma and fluid dynamics.
• To encode the nonnative Hamiltonian evolution, we decompose the Hilbert space into a direct sum of invariant subspaces in which the nonlinear problem is mapped to a finite-dimensional Hamiltonian simulation problem.