Group seminar at MPQ and Zoom: Fault-tolerant fermionic quantum simulation with fermionic atoms

Alexander Schuckert, JQI & University of Maryland, USA
Group seminar at MPQ lecture hall and Zoom
Tuesday, 10 December, 09:00am (MEZ)

Experiments with fermionic atoms in optical lattices have led to breakthroughs in understanding fundamental condensed-matter phenomena. However, elevating such experiments from a tool of scientific exploration to a computational tool capable of quantitatively predicting molecule and material properties requires overcoming decoherence with fault-tolerance techniques. Existing approaches encode qubits into atoms, losing one of the fundamental advantages of cold-atoms: their fermionic nature. In this talk, we introduce a fault-tolerant qubit-fermion quantum computing framework by encoding logical fermionic degrees of freedom as well as qubits into a set of fermionic atoms. Our scheme yields an exponential improvement in circuit depth from O(N) to O(log(N)) with respect to lattice site number N compared to state-of-the-art qubit-only approaches for a crucial subroutine in simulating crystalline materials. We will discuss how to implement all fault-tolerant primitives in neutral atoms. In particular, we require a pairing gate which we show how to implement using photo-dissociation of Feshbach molecules. Our work opens the door to fermion-qubit fault-tolerant quantum computation in neutral atoms, with applications in quantum chemistry, material science and high-energy physics.