Francesco Pederiva (Trento U.)
First baby-steps in the simulation of nuclear reactions on quantum computers

Quantum computers are based on the propagating of a quantum state according to a unitary transformation. One of the most straightforward applications of this concept is the study of the time evolution of an arbitrary state, mapped on a set of qubits, which can simulate the time evolution of a physical system of interest. This operation, hard to implement for a many-body system, becomes even harder for a many-nucleon system, where the very nature of the effective nucleon-nucleon force introduces an exponentially growing complexity because of the explicit spin/isospin dependence. In this contribution we want to present some first steps that we have taken in order to develop a practical protocol for simulating on a quantum device a nuclear reaction, starting from the case of two neutrons interacting with a simple LO chiral force. We will present some results focused on the evolution of spins, first considering fixed coordinates, then introducing a classical evolution of the position in order to study the feasibility of the study of a parametrically evolving Hamiltonian on present available NISQ devices, the first step necesary to start thinking of simulating more complex situations.