Fermionic atoms obey the poly exclusion principle, preventing more than one from being in the same quantum state. Consequently, they are perfect for modeling systems such as molecules, superconductors, and quark-gluon plasmas where fermionic statistics are important.
Using fermionic atoms, scientists from Austria and the US have designed a new quantum computer to simulate complex physical systems. The processor uses programmable neutral atom arrays and has hardware-efficient fermionic gates for sampling fermionic models.
The team, led by Peter Zoeller, showed how the new quantum processor can simulate fermionic models from quantum chemistry and particle physics with great accuracy.
A fermionic register and several fermionic quantum gates comprise a fermionic quantum processor. A local unit of a register of quantum information consists of a collection of fermionic modes, which may be empty or inhabited by a single fermion.
said Daniel González Cuatra from the research team led by Peter Zoller at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). „The state of a system we want to simulate, such as a multi-electron molecule, is usually a superposition of multiple occupation patterns, which are encoded directly into this register.”
„This information is then processed using a fermionic quantum circuit designed to simulate the time evolution of a molecule. Any such circuit can be decomposed into an array of two types of fermionic gates, a tunnel and a contact gate.
Scientists propose to hold and manipulate fermionic atoms with extreme precision in an array of highly concentrated laser beams, optical tweezers. The necessary fermionic quantum gates can be implemented natively on this site: interaction gates are implemented by first exciting the atoms to Rydberg states and carrying a strong dipole moment, and tunneling gates are obtained by controlling the tunneling of the atom between two optical tweezers. .
Daniel Gonzalez Cuatra said, „By using fermions to encode and process quantum information, certain properties of the simulated system are intrinsically guaranteed at the hardware level, which would require additional resources in a standard qubit-based quantum computer.”
„I am very excited about the future of this field and want to continue to contribute by finding the most promising applications for fermionic quantum processing and by designing tailored algorithms that can run on near-future devices.”
Journal Note:
- Fermionic quantum processing with programmable neutral atom arrays. D. Gonzalez-Cuatra, D. Bluestein, M. Kalinowski, R. Goubruger, N. Mascara, B. Naldesi, TV Sache, A.M. Kaufman, MD. Lukin, H. Bichler, B. Vermeerch, Jun Ye and P. Zolar. PNAS 2023 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2304294120