Quantum simulation of nuclear inelastic scattering
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Abstract
We present the hybrid quantum/classical algorithm for nuclear inelastic scattering in the time-dependent basis function on qubits approach. It is a non-perturbative approach for simulating these processes on quantum computers. Working in the interaction picture and dividing the full Hamiltonian into the reference and external interaction parts, this method adopts ab initio nuclear structure calculations for the eigenbases of the reference Hamiltonian. An importance truncation scheme is applied to trim the basis, where the Trotterized time-evolution operator is then applied to account for the time-dependent external interaction. By qubitizing the basis representation, the quantum circuit is prepared according to the time-evolution operator and is passed to the quantum computer for simulations. For this explanatory work, we illustrate this method by studying the Coulomb excitation of the deuteron, where the quantum simulations are performed with IBM Qiskit.