Quantum Computing in Nuclear Physics

Abstract: In this thesis, we investigate many–body systems using simulations of quan- tum computers. Quantum computing is a computational paradigm based on qubits which are defined in a Hilbert space instead of the familiar binary bits. This architecture implies that quantum computers are especially suited to simulate quantum systems that are otherwise difficult to compute. In this work, the excitation and time evolution of different kinds of many–body systems are considered. In particular, the manuscript is focused on electro- magnetic transitions and particle transfer reactions of light atomic nuclei such as the deuteron and triton. Nuclei are modeled using pion–less lat- tice effective field theory, which considers the chiral symmetry of the quan- tum chromodynamics Lagrangian in an expansion to construct an effective Hamiltonian. Different methods of time evolution on quantum computers are compared, such as the Linear Combinations of Unitary Operations or the Trotter–Suzuki methods. Additionally, different noise mitigation strate- gies are compared and results are shown to simulate the performance on realistic and noisy quantum computers.