Jonathan Engel (UNC Chapel Hill)
Solving Nuclear Structure Problems with the Adaptive Variational Quantum Algorithm

With the Lipkin model and the valence shell model as examples, I show that the Adaptive Variational Quantum Algorithm works well in nuclear-structure problems that involve phase transitions and symmetry breaking at the mean-field level. The number of quantum operations needed to find the ground-state energy scales linearly with the number of nucleons in these models as long as the noise level is below a certain threshold. The results suggest that near- and intermediate-term quantum computers will be useful for nuclear-structure theory.