English

Bridging Quantum Computing and Nuclear Structure: Atomic Nuclei on a Trapped-Ion Quantum Computer

Nuclear Theory 2026-02-10 v4 Quantum Physics

Abstract

We demonstrate quantum simulations of strongly correlated nuclear many-body systems on the RIKEN-Quantinuum Reimei trapped-ion quantum computer, targeting ground states of oxygen, calcium, and nickel isotopes. By combining a hard-core-boson representation of the nuclear shell model with a pair-unitary coupled-cluster doubles ansatz, we achieve sub-percent relative error in the ground-state energies compared to noise-free statevector simulations. Our approach leverages symmetry-aware state preparation and particle-number post-selection to efficiently capture pairing correlations characteristic of systems with same-species nucleons. These findings highlight the viability of high-fidelity trapped-ion platforms for nuclear physics applications and provide a foundation for scaling to more complex nuclear systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.20642,
  title  = {Bridging Quantum Computing and Nuclear Structure: Atomic Nuclei on a Trapped-Ion Quantum Computer},
  author = {Sota Yoshida and Takeshi Sato and Takumi Ogata and Masaaki Kimura},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.20642},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

15 pages and 7 figures including supplemental material; Accepted version

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:55:08.700Z