We report a quantum simulation of the deuteron binding energy on quantum processors accessed via cloud servers. We use a Hamiltonian from pionless effective field theory at leading order. We design a low-depth version of the unitary coupled-cluster ansatz, use the variational quantum eigensolver algorithm, and compute the binding energy to within a few percent. Our work is the first step towards scalable nuclear structure computations on a quantum processor via the cloud, and it sheds light on how to map scientific computing applications onto nascent quantum devices.
@article{arxiv.1801.03897,
title = {Cloud Quantum Computing of an Atomic Nucleus},
author = {E. F. Dumitrescu and A. J. McCaskey and G. Hagen and G. R. Jansen and T. D. Morris and T. Papenbrock and R. C. Pooser and D. J. Dean and P. Lougovski},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.03897},
year = {2018}
}