Lipkin model on a quantum computer

Understand

Atomic nuclei are important laboratories for exploring and testing new insights into the universe, such as experiments to directly detect dark matter or explore properties of neutrinos.

• The targets of interest are often heavy, complex nuclei that challenge our ability to reliably model them (as well as quantify the uncertainty of those models) with classical computers.
• Hence there is great interest in applying quantum computation to nuclear structure for these applications.
• As an early step in this direction, especially with regards to the uncertainties in the relevant quantum calculations, we develop circuits to implement variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithms for the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model, which is often used in the nuclear physics community as a testbed for many-body methods.