No Arabic abstract
Coupling a quantum many-body system to an external environment dramatically changes its dynamics and offers novel possibilities not found in closed systems. Of special interest are the properties of the steady state of such open quantum many-body systems, as well as the relaxation dynamics towards the steady state. However, new computational tools are required to simulate open quantum many-body systems, as methods developed for closed systems cannot be readily applied. We review several approaches to simulate open many-body systems and point out the advances made in recent years towards the simulation of large system sizes.
Quantum many-body systems (QMBs) are some of the most challenging physical systems to simulate numerically. Methods involving approximations for tensor network (TN) contractions have proven to be viable alternatives to algorithms such as quantum Monte Carlo or simulated annealing. However, these methods are cumbersome, difficult to implement, and often have significant limitations in their accuracy and efficiency when considering systems in more than one dimension. In this paper, we explore the exact computation of TN contractions on two-dimensional geometries and present a heuristic improvement of TN contraction that reduces the computing time, the amount of memory, and the communication time. We run our algorithm for the Ising model using memory optimized x1.32x large instances on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Our results show that cloud computing is a viable alternative to supercomputers for this class of scientific applications.
Quantum sensors have been shown to be superior to their classical counterparts in terms of resource efficiency. Such sensors have traditionally used the time evolution of special forms of initially entangled states, adaptive measurement basis change, or the ground state of many-body systems tuned to criticality. Here, we propose a different way of doing quantum sensing which exploits the dynamics of a many-body system, initialized in a product state, along with a sequence of projective measurements in a specific basis. The procedure has multiple practical advantages as it: (i) enables remote quantum sensing, protecting a sample from the potentially invasive readout apparatus; and (ii) simplifies initialization by avoiding complex entangled or critical ground states. From a fundamental perspective, it harnesses a resource so far unexploited for sensing, namely, the residual information from the unobserved part of the many-body system after the wave-function collapses accompanying the measurements. By increasing the number of measurement sequences, through the means of a Bayesian estimator, precision beyond the standard limit, approaching the Heisenberg bound, is shown to be achievable.
Artificial Neural Networks were recently shown to be an efficient representation of highly-entangled many-body quantum states. In practical applications, neural-network states inherit numerical schemes used in Variational Monte Carlo, most notably the use of Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) sampling to estimate quantum expectations. The local stochastic sampling in MCMC caps the potential advantages of neural networks in two ways: (i) Its intrinsic computational cost sets stringent practical limits on the width and depth of the networks, and therefore limits their expressive capacity; (ii) Its difficulty in generating precise and uncorrelated samples can result in estimations of observables that are very far from their true value. Inspired by the state-of-the-art generative models used in machine learning, we propose a specialized Neural Network architecture that supports efficient and exact sampling, completely circumventing the need for Markov Chain sampling. We demonstrate our approach for two-dimensional interacting spin models, showcasing the ability to obtain accurate results on larger system sizes than those currently accessible to neural-network quantum states.
Quantum simulators are attractive as a means to study many-body quantum systems that are not amenable to classical numerical treatment. A versatile framework for quantum simulation is offered by superconducting circuits. In this perspective, we discuss how superconducting circuits allow the engineering of a wide variety of interactions, which in turn allows the simulation of a wide variety of model Hamiltonians. In particular we focus on strong photon-photon interactions mediated by nonlinear elements. This includes on-site, nearest-neighbour and four-body interactions in lattice models, allowing the implementation of extended Bose-Hubbard models and the toric code. We discuss not only the present state in analogue quantum simulation, but also future perspectives of superconducting quantum simulation that open up when concatenating quantum gates in emerging quantum computing platforms.
While quantum computers are capable of simulating many quantum systems efficiently, the simulation algorithms must begin with the preparation of an appropriate initial state. We present a method for generating physically relevant quantum states on a lattice in real space. In particular, the present algorithm is able to prepare general pure and mixed many-particle states of any number of particles. It relies on a procedure for converting from a second-quantized state to its first-quantized counterpart. The algorithm is efficient in that it operates in time that is polynomial in all the essential descriptors of the system, such the number of particles, the resolution of the lattice, and the inverse of the maximum final error. This scaling holds under the assumption that the wavefunction to be prepared is bounded or its indefinite integral known and that the Fock operator of the system is efficiently simulatable.