Non-equilibrium dynamics of a dissipative two-site Hubbard model simulated on IBM quantum computers

Abstract

Many-body physics is one very well suited field for testing quantum algorithms and for finding working heuristics on present quantum computers. We have investigated the non-equilibrium dynamics of one- and two-electron systems, which are coupled to an environment that introduces decoherence and dissipation. In our approach, the electronic system is represented in the framework of a two-site Hubbard model while the environment is modelled by a spin bath. To simulate the non-equilibrium population probabilities of the different states on a quantum computer we have encoded the electronic states and environmental degrees of freedom into qubits and ancilla qubits (bath), respectively. The total evolution time was divided into short time intervals, during which the system evolves. After each of these time steps, the system interacts with ancilla qubits representing the bath in thermal equilibrium. We have specifically studied spin baths leading to both, unital and non-unital dynamics of the electronic system and have found that electron correlations clearly enhance the electron transfer rates in the latter case. For short time periods, the simulation on the quantum computer is found to be in very good agreement with the exact results if error mitigation methods are applied. Our method to simulate also non-unitary time-evolution on a quantum computer can be well extended to simulate electronic systems in correlated spin baths as well as in bosonic and fermionic baths.