Theory Seminar: Fermionic quantum processing with programmable neutral atom arrays

Daniel González Cuadra, University of Innsbruck
Theory Seminar, Herbert-Walther-lecture hall (G0.25)
Wednesday, April 26th, 2:00pm (MEZ) 

Abstract:

Simulating the properties of many-body fermionic systems is an outstanding computational challenge relevant to material science, quantum chemistry, and particle physics. Although qubit-based quantum computers can potentially tackle this problem more efficiently than classical devices, encoding non-local fermionic statistics introduces an overhead in the required resources, limiting their applicability on near-term architectures. In this talk, I will present a fermionic quantum processor, where fermionic models are locally encoded in a fermionic register and simulated in a hardware-efficient manner using fermionic gates. I will consider in particular fermionic atoms in programmable tweezer arrays and present different protocols to implement non-local tunneling gates, guaranteeing Fermi statistics at the hardware level. I will then use this gate set, together with Rydberg-mediated interaction gates, to find efficient circuit decompositions for digital and variational quantum simulation algorithms, illustrated here for molecular energy estimation. Finally, I will consider a combined fermion-qudit architecture, where both the motional and internal degrees of freedom of the atoms are harnessed to efficiently simulate lattice gauge theory dynamics.