Ryan J.
MacDonell
ad,
Claire E.
Dickerson
abcd,
Clare J. T.
Birch
ad,
Alok
Kumar
e,
Claire L.
Edmunds
bc,
Michael J.
Biercuk
bc,
Cornelius
Hempel†
bcd and
Ivan
Kassal
*ad
aSchool of Chemistry, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. E-mail: ivan.kassal@sydney.edu.au
bSchool of Physics, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
cARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
dUniversity of Sydney Nano Institute, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
eDepartment of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, 400076, India
First published on 18th June 2021
Ultrafast chemical reactions are difficult to simulate because they involve entangled, many-body wavefunctions whose computational complexity grows rapidly with molecular size. In photochemistry, the breakdown of the Born–Oppenheimer approximation further complicates the problem by entangling nuclear and electronic degrees of freedom. Here, we show that analog quantum simulators can efficiently simulate molecular dynamics using commonly available bosonic modes to represent molecular vibrations. Our approach can be implemented in any device with a qudit controllably coupled to bosonic oscillators and with quantum hardware resources that scale linearly with molecular size, and offers significant resource savings compared to digital quantum simulation algorithms. Advantages of our approach include a time resolution orders of magnitude better than ultrafast spectroscopy, the ability to simulate large molecules with limited hardware using a Suzuki–Trotter expansion, and the ability to implement realistic system-bath interactions with only one additional interaction per mode. Our approach can be implemented with current technology; e.g., the conical intersection in pyrazine can be simulated using a single trapped ion. Therefore, we expect our method will enable classically intractable chemical dynamics simulations in the near term.
Quantum computing promises to reduce the steep computational cost of simulating quantum systems by representing the problem on a controllable quantum device.8–16 Most chemical applications of quantum computing have focused on time-independent observables,17–27 in an effort to reduce the cost of electronic-structure methods. Such quantum methods optimize trial wavefunctions and map observables onto registers of qubits, and can predict molecular properties with linearly many qubits and polynomially many quantum gates as a function of molecule size.17,18 Due to limitations in qubit count and coherence times of current quantum computers, many recent methods use hybrid approaches, such as variational quantum eigensolvers, to divide the calculation into classical and quantum tasks.20–24,26 By contrast, few quantum algorithms focus on the simulation of molecular dynamics. Proposed methods include the simulation of electronic21 and vibrational28,29 dynamics and the coupling between them.30,31 Although each of these methods scales polynomially with system size, their qubit requirements restrict them to small model systems.
Analog quantum simulators provide an alternative approach to quantum simulation by mapping a desired Hamiltonian onto a purpose-built quantum system.11–15 As a result, the dynamics of the simulator directly corresponds to the dynamics of the simulated system, and allowing any observables to be read out, in principle, using suitable measurements. Qubit-based analog simulators have already been used to demonstrate quantum advantage by carrying out classically-intractable simulations of spin models.32,33 As a chemical application, ultracold atoms in optical lattices were proposed to simulate the electronic degrees of freedom of a molecule in a grid-based adiabatic picture.34
Particularly promising recent approaches to analog quantum simulation have taken advantage of bosonic modes natively present in certain architectures, including photonic chips, microwave resonators, and trapped ions. Using native bosonic degrees of freedom gives analog simulators an advantage over digital ones, which would require many qubits to accurately represent a single harmonic oscillator. Chemical applications of bosonic simulation have mainly focused on the vibrational degrees of freedom of molecules, such as vibrational dynamics35,36 and Franck–Condon vibronic spectra.19,36–39 Approaches that include the entanglement of internal states to bosonic modes could simulate more complex processes, such as the dynamics of fermionic lattice models,40,41 with possible extensions to electron-nuclear dynamics for quantum chemistry,41,42 as well as models of charge and energy transfer.43–46
Here, we show that analog quantum simulators can efficiently simulate non-adiabatic chemical dynamics. Our approach can be implemented using any quantum system containing a qudit with controllable couplings to a set of bosonic modes, a device we call a mixed qudit-boson (MQB) simulator. We achieve linear scaling in molecular size by mapping a molecule with d electronic states and N vibrational modes onto an MQB with a d-level qudit and N bosonic modes. We analyze the non-adiabatic dynamics of pyrazine as an example, showing it can be simulated using a single trapped-ion MQB, and we detail how to extend the procedure to large systems using a Trotterization scheme and to open systems using laser cooling.
(1) |
(2) |
Fig. 1 Representations of molecular potential-energy surfaces and their link to chemical dynamics. (a) Adiabatic surfaces correspond to the eigenvalues of the Born–Oppenheimer Hamiltonian at all nuclear displacements. The upper and lower surfaces shown correspond to higher- and lower-energy electronic states. Two inset molecules illustrate different molecular geometries at two sets of nuclear coordinates Q1 and Q2. An initial wavepacket (blue, top left) can slide down the upper surface and, upon reaching the conical intersection (the cusp where the two surfaces are degenerate) it can split into two entangled branches (blue and cyan), one on each electronic surface. (b) Diabatic surfaces (red, orange) of a vibronic coupling Hamiltonian (eqn (1)) formed from the adiabatic surfaces in a. The diabatic surfaces are analytic, avoiding numerical divergences near conical intersections. The couplings between the diabatic surfaces are not shown. |
To map VC Hamiltonians onto MQB simulators, we exploit the similarities between terms in ĤVC and common entangling gates in MQB architectures. We start by expressing an LVC model in the interaction picture,
(3) |
(4) |
Each of the parameters in ĤMQBI can be tuned using well-developed light-matter interactions. For example, for an ion trap, corresponds to a time-dependent AC Stark shift from a pair of non-copropagating lasers, is proportional to the Rabi frequency of a Mølmer–Sørensen interaction, χn is a time-independent AC Stark shift and δj is the detuning from (sideband) resonance for mode j (see Appendix A for details). Therefore, because eqn (4) is of the same form as eqn (3), the terms of the MQB Hamiltonian can be tuned to match those of an LVC Hamiltonian.
The MQB approach can also be extended to higher-order expansions; the second-order terms of a QVC Hamiltonian, in the interaction picture, become
(5) |
Both the dispersive (j = k) and mode-mixing (j ≠ k) terms have been demonstrated experimentally in trapped ions52,53 and cQED.54,55
Overall, the numbers of qudit states and bosonic modes required for the MQB mapping scale linearly with the corresponding numbers of molecular degrees of freedom, a significant improvement over the exponential classical scaling of fully quantum-mechanical chemical dynamics methods. Fig. 2 shows that even optimised classical methods such as MCTDH are limited to tens of modes for many systems, meaning that small to medium MQBs could achieve quantum advantage. Fig. 2 also shows that the MQB approach can simulate chemical dynamics with a significant improvement in quantum hardware requirements compared to digital approaches.30,31 Our advantage comes from the larger Hilbert space in a bosonic mode, which would otherwise require many qubits to simulate, possibly with complicated interactions between them being required to simulate simple bosonic processes. In MQB architectures, this advantage can be decisive, because a single well-controlled bosonic mode might be comparably difficult to implement experimentally as a single well-controlled qubit.
The advantage of the MQB approach is due to the natural mapping between molecular vibrations and MQB bosonic modes, which obviates the need, present on digital computers, to represent the large bosonic Hilbert space using qubits. The precise quantum requirements depend on the nature of the MQB simulator: if trapped ions are used, each ion provides three vibrational modes, while in cQED, each resonator could yield dozens of microwave modes.56,57 The cost of the simulation can also be measured in the total number of interaction terms required, which scales as Nkd(d + 1)/2 for an order-k expansion of eqn (2). The vast majority of VC Hamiltonians are LVC models, which scale linearly with the number of vibrational modes, or QVC models, which scale quadratically.1 The number of vibrations is a measure of the size of the molecule because it equals N = 3Nn − 6 in a molecule with Nn atoms. Furthermore, the simulation may be simplified by excluding certain modes or interactions that do not participate in the dynamics, either exactly (due to symmetry) or approximately (due to weak coupling).
Many initial states can readily be prepared on an MQB simulator using established techniques. In particular, in most photochemical studies, the Franck–Condon principle implies that photoexcitation only promotes the electronic degree of freedom to an excited state, leaving the vibrations unchanged.1 On the MQB simulator, this corresponds to a change of the qudit state with no change to the bosonic state. In more general cases, superpositions of simulator qudits states could be prepared to simulate molecules with nearly degenerate electronic states or undergoing broadband excitation. Sometimes, it is convenient to work with displaced nuclear coordinates, in which case the initial state must be displaced as well, as discussed in Appendix B.
Simulating the time evolution involves implementing qudit-boson interactions according to eqn (3) and (5) to mimic the VC Hamiltonian for the duration of the evolution. Given the correct light-matter interactions, the MQB simulator evolves in real time with the same dynamics as the VC model, except that the Hamiltonian is scaled by a factor F so that the evolution occurs on the natural timescale of the MQB simulator. The scaling freedom is a major advantage for the simulation: whereas molecular vibronic frequencies are typically 10–100 THz, MQB simulators operate at frequencies that are many orders of magnitude less (e.g., kHz for trapped ions, F ∼ 10−9, and GHz for cQED, F ∼ 10−3). The dynamics on the simulator thus occur in extreme slow motion relative to the simulated molecule, meaning the quantum simulator, like classical algorithms, has a much greater time resolution than ultrafast molecular spectroscopy.
Finally, after evolution for the desired amount of time, the MQB simulator can be probed to measure observables. Most chemically important observables do not require knowledge of the full wavefunction (which would require exponentially scaling full state tomography), and are instead easily measurable properties of the qudits or the bosons, such as the electronic-state populations or nuclear positions and momenta. Most MQB architectures have established methods for measuring qudit states; boson observables can also be measured, often by first mapping them onto the qudits.38,58 Due to the statistical nature of quantum measurement, observables must be averaged over many experiments, while repeating the experiment for different simulation times would yield temporal information. Importantly, the results at any simulation time are independent of the measurements from previous times and the time intervals at which the measurements are made.
(6) |
Fig. 3 Example of the mapping between the degrees of freedom of a molecule (pyrazine, eqn (6)) and an MQB simulator (one trapped-ion qubit, eqn (8)). (a) The degrees of freedom of the molecule: electronic, shown as red and orange electronic orbitals; vibrational, shown as cyan and blue atomic displacements; and their couplings shown in purple and magenta. (b) The corresponding degrees of freedom for the trapped ion: qubit states (red and orange levels); bosonic modes (cyan and blue potential curves); and laser-mediated interactions (purple and magenta). |
In the absence of a laser field, the Hamiltonian of a single, two-level trapped ion is
(7) |
(8) |
The initialization, evolution, and measurement steps of a pyrazine simulation are illustrated in Fig. 4a–c. This simulation can be simplified by working in a displaced frame, which can transform the tuning term (third term in eqn (8)) to either which are more easily implemented in trapped ions (details in Appendix B). To compensate for the frame displacement, Fig. 4a shows an initial wave function displacement.
Fig. 4 Illustrative molecular-dynamics simulation using an MQB simulator (trapped-ion qubit for concreteness). (a) The initial wavefunction is prepared by an excitation of the qudit state (yellow arrow/laser) and a displacement along the relevant mode(s) (blue arrow/laser). (b) The VC Hamiltonian is implemented through interactions with laser fields (purple and magenta, see eqn (4)), which are equivalent to displacements and couplings between potential energy surfaces. These interactions are maintained for the duration of the simulation. (c) After evolution by the effective Hamiltonian, observables of the wavefunction (inset: excited state population) are measured by a detector (e.g., fluorescence of the qubit state induced by the red laser). Multiple measurements are required to obtain expectation values, and the time dependence of observables is obtained by varying the time delay from initialization to measurement. (d) The evolution step can be discretized using a Suzuki–Trotter expansion into a series of short laser interactions, particularly for the treatment of many modes. (e) Open quantum systems can be simulated by adding sideband laser cooling (green) during the evolution step. |
Here, we describe two approaches to analog Trotterization. We assume that the base Hamiltonian Ĥ0 cannot be turned off, while interaction Hamiltonians Ĥk, for 1 ≤ k ≤ M, can be turned on and off on demand.
The rescaling approach relies on the fact that, in an analog simulation, the total Hamiltonian can be scaled by a constant factor, changing only the speed of the simulation. The individual terms can also be rescaled, as long as the total Hamiltonian remains proportional to the molecular Hamiltonian. If we re-express the full Hamiltonian as the first-order evolution (for timestep Δt) is Essentially, the evolution by Ĥ0 is slowed down relative to the interaction terms to compensate for the continuous evolution under Ĥ0 while the Ĥk are implemented in turn. Higher-order Suzuki–Trotter expansions can be used to reduce the Trotterization error.
The rewinding approach treats Ĥ0 and the interaction terms on the same timescale (i.e., without rescaling), instead reversing the excessive evolution under Ĥ0. This approach assumes that time evolution under can be implemented between Trotter steps. At first order, this scheme is given by i.e., by correcting the evolution by exp(iĤ0Δt) after each Trotter step, which can be thought of as implementing another unitary of the form exp(−i(−2Ĥ0)Δt) while the base Hamiltonian is always on.
The two approaches have similar performance, as can be seen in the example of a two-mode system, where
(9) |
(10) |
A difference between the two approaches arises in the limit of many interaction terms, where one approach may be preferred over another depending on experimental limitations; the rescaling approach requires fewer operations, while the rewinding approach ensures that all components evolve at the same rate.
Here, we show how ion-trap MQB simulators could simulate system-bath coupling with a desired coupling strength and effective temperature (Fig. 4e). While simulating arbitrary system-bath interactions would be complicated, we focus on the leading contribution to dissipation in molecules in a thermal bath, coupling to vibrational modes.61 Our approach extends system-bath simulations using laser cooling,46 and requires a maximum number of interactions that scales linearly with the number of modes coupled to the environment.
The conditions for a molecular simulation at a finite temperature are commonly given by the coupling of a constant-temperature bath of harmonic oscillators to the molecular modes to represent inter-molecular collisions.4,61 We consider a bath at temperature T with jump operators (γj(j + 1))1/2âj for cooling and for heating of mode j, where γj are the system-bath coupling strengths and j = (exp(ωj/kBT) − 1)−1 are the Bose–Einstein occupation numbers of the bath. This gives the master equation
(11) |
Similar time evolution can be obtained using laser cooling, which is used in ion-trap quantum computation to cool the ions to their ground motional state. Applied lasers both cool and heat; in the resolved sideband limit, the combined evolution due to laser cooling and heating takes the form45,62
(12) |
(13) |
(14) |
Comparing eqn (11) and (12) shows that laser cooling and heating can simulate molecular thermal dissipation if the experimental parameters are chosen so that γj = A−j − A+j and j = A+j/(A−j − A+j), which can be achieved in two steps. First, because A+j/(A−j − A+j) depends only on Δ and Γj, those two parameters can be chosen to simulate a specific j and, therefore, the temperature. Second, A−j − A+j is proportional to the square of the remaining free parameter, Ω0, which depends on the tunable laser intensity and can therefore be used to set the system-bath interaction γj for each mode j.
The experimental couplings γj must be scaled to simulator frequencies, as was done for Ĥ. Such a rescaling changes the timescale in eqn (11), giving Rabi frequencies in Hz to kHz instead of GHz to THz. By contrast, the occupation numbers j are dimensionless and require no scaling. The difference between molecular and trapped-ion frequencies results in a difference in their vibrational temperatures because the invariable j depends only on ωj/kBT. For example, a simulation at 300 K corresponds to an ion-trap vibrational temperature of ∼40 μK, which is readily achievable in ion traps.63
Fig. 6 shows an example of weak system-bath coupling with the LVC model of pyrazine at 300 K. The simulation assumes the Ohmic system-bath couplings that are widely used in chemical dynamics,59γj = γ0ωje−ωj/ω0, where γ0 is constant and ω0 is the high-frequency cutoff.
Our scheme requires at most one laser-cooling interaction per mode. However, because chemical dynamics often takes place at low temperatures (kBT ≪ ωj), it may be possible to simultaneously cool all the vibrational modes with only a single broadband cooling laser. Even at room temperature, j ≪ 1 for typical molecular vibrations with frequencies of tens of THz. In that limit, only the cooling terms in eqn (11) are significant, . If we also assume that all the γj are comparable (which is true for a slowly varying ohmic spectral density and comparable values of ωj), we arrive at a master equation that can be simulated with just one broadband cooling laser, which can cool all the modes simultaneously.64 For example, repeating the simulation of Fig. 6 with a single cooling laser and equal γj leads to imperceptible changes in the populations shown.
The principal sources of error for MQB simulation will be decoherence and thermalization, but the subspace most affected may depend on the architecture. For example, while trapped-ion simulators have electronic coherence times of seconds or longer, motional decoherence (typically dephasing) will limit simulations because it sets in within 1–100 ms.65,66 By contrast, in cQED, the limiting factor is likely to be the qudit coherence time, typically 50–100 μs and shorter than the coherence time of the cavity modes, which is limited by cavity losses and may be 2 ms or more.54,67
Whether an MQB simulator will be useful depends on the ratio of its decoherence time and the necessary simulation time at realistic experimental frequencies. A simulation requires a scaling factor F that relates molecular and simulator frequencies, ωsim = Fωmol. In order to complete a simulation for a time tmax (in molecular timescales) within a decoherence time τd, F must exceed tmax/τd. If, in addition, the time evolution is broken into M Trotter components, the lower bound of F is Fmin = Mtmax/τd. There are also two upper limits on F determined by experimental conditions: first, as the ratio of the maximum experimentally achievable frequency or coupling to the corresponding molecular parameter, e.g., for a coupling interaction; and second, in a Trotterized simulation, as the ratio of the maximum acceptable molecular-scale timestep to the minimum timestep achievable experimentally, F(2)max = Δtmol/Δtsim. The simulation will be completed within the decoherence time if F can be chosen to meet all these constraints, i.e., if both F(1)max and F(2)max are larger than Fmin. To minimize decoherence, F should ideally be set to the upper bound.
The constraints above can be relaxed if the native dissipation in an MQB simulator can be harnessed to simulate dynamics in open quantum systems, which are often of greater practical relevance than isolated molecules. For example, decoherence and dissipation of bosonic modes might be tuned (e.g., via temperature) to values that simulate elastic and inelastic collisions in condensed phases or at high pressures. For such a simulation, care must be taken to consider the relative dissipation rates of electronic and vibrational modes, particularly for cQED simulators where the relevant internal and bosonic frequencies have similar magnitudes.
The limits of a simulation also depend on the observable of interest, meaning that many simulations will be able to run longer than worst-case estimates from fidelities. In general, errors in analog simulation depend strongly on the observable, with global properties being more robust.68,69 For example, in Fig. 5 with a Trotter step of 0.5 fs (blue lines), the population deviates by at most 0.05 in 300 fs, whereas the fidelity rapidly decays to less than 0.6 in the same time. Fortunately, most chemically interesting molecular observables are global properties, rather than properties of individual vibronic eigenstates, which would allow for greater error tolerance than fidelities would suggest.
Finally, in very large systems, the number of bosonic modes could be limited by the experimental apparatus. In trapped ions, the frequencies of the modes become increasingly spectrally congested as the number of ions increases, which may eventually lead to cross-talk due to multiple modes interacting with a single laser frequency.50,70 So far, ion trap experiments have been performed with as many as 40 resolved modes.70 In cQED, resonators are physically coupled to qudits, placing spatial limitations in connecting many resonators a single qudit. However, if multimode resonators56,57 are used, their total number may be suitable for medium-scale simulations. Therefore, the current technological capabilities are more than enough for near-term demonstration and will undoubtedly improve as technology develops.
Tuning terms in the LVC Hamiltonian can be generated using two non-copropagating lasers, which can induce Raman transitions that couple the internal states of an N-level trapped ion with its vibrational mode j (frequency ωionj). If the frequency between the two lasers is ωionj − δj, the resulting interaction-picture Hamiltonian becomes
(15) |
Coupling terms in the LVC Hamiltonian can be generated if, instead, the difference between the laser frequencies is ΔEionn,m ± (ωionk − δk), where ΔEionn,m is the energy difference between internal states n and m, and the plus or minus determining whether the interaction corresponds to a blue- or red-sideband transition. The sum of red and blue sideband terms gives a Hamiltonian of the form
(16) |
The total interaction Hamiltonian is obtained by adding an instance of eqn (15) for each tuning mode and an instance of eqn (16) for each coupling mode. Once the time-independent AC Stark shifts χn are also included, the total Hamiltonian becomes
(17) |
(18) |
The results above are general for any number of internal states and any number of vibrational modes. Although a single ion has only three vibrational modes, additional modes can be obtained by adding ancillary, optically inactive ions into the trap. The ancillary ions can be made optically inactive in multiple ways, including the use of different isotopes72 or by pumping them into long-lived shelved states.73,74
For a two-state system (n, m ∈{0, 1} with two modes (t = {1}, c = {2}), eqn (18) simplifies to eqn (8) of the main text.
One way to do this is by a coherent displacement of the Hamiltonian along a single mode. This corresponds to the action of a displacement operator, k(β) = exp(−iβk) for mode k and real β, where
(19) |
(20) |
Dropping the constant term ωkβ2/2 and truncating to linear terms (ck,j(n,m) = 0) yields the displaced LVC Hamiltonian,
(21) |
In the two-state case (n,m ∈ {0,1}), the electronic components of the LVC Hamiltonian can be expressed in terms of Pauli operators to yield
(22) |
(23) |
The dynamics simulated with the displaced VC Hamiltonian is exactly equivalent (i.e., produces the same observables) to that of the original model as long as the initial wavefunction is displaced by an equal amount, which is achievable for common bosonic simulators.72,75
Footnote |
† Present address: Paul Scherrer Institute, 5232 Villigen PSI, Switzerland |
This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2021 |