Witnessing objectivity on a quantum computer

Understanding the emergence of objectivity from the quantum realm has been a long standing issue strongly related to the quantum to classical crossover. Quantum Darwinism provides an answer, interpreting objectivity as consensus between independent observers. Quantum computers provide an interesting platform for such experimental investigation of quantum Darwinism, fulfilling their initial intended purpose as quantum simulators. Here we assess to what degree current NISQ devices can be used as experimental platforms in the field of quantum Darwinism. We do this by simulating an exactly solvable stochastic collision model, taking advantage of the analytical solution to benchmark the experimental results.

Applications of quantum computing for investigations of electronic transitions in phenylsulfonyl-carbazole TADF emitters

A quantum chemistry study of the first singlet (S1) and triplet (T1) excited states of phenylsulfonyl-carbazole compounds, proposed as useful thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) emitters for organic light emitting diode (OLED) applications, was performed with the quantum Equation-Of-Motion Variational Quantum Eigensolver (qEOM-VQE) and Variational Quantum Deflation (VQD) algorithms on quantum simulators and devices. These quantum simulations were performed with double zeta quality basis sets on an active space comprising the highest occupied and lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals (HOMO, LUMO) of the TADF molecules. The differences in energy separations between S1 and T1 (ΔEST) predicted by calculations on quantum simulators were found to be in excellent agreement with experimental data. Differences of 17 and 88 mHa with respect to exact energies were found for excited states by using the qEOM-VQE and VQD algorithms, respectively, to perform simulations on quantum devices without error mitigation. By utilizing state tomography to purify the quantum states and correct energy values, the large errors found for unmitigated results could be improved to differences of, at most, 4 mHa with respect to exact values. Consequently, excellent agreement could be found between values of ΔEST predicted by quantum simulations and those found in experiments.

Practical verification protocols for analog quantum simulators

Analog quantum simulation is expected to be a significant application of near-term quantum devices. Verification of these devices without comparison to known simulation results will be an important task as the system size grows beyond the regime that can be simulated classically. We introduce a set of experimentally-motivated verification protocols for analog quantum simulators, discussing their sensitivity to a variety of error sources and their scalability to larger system sizes. We demonstrate these protocols experimentally using a two-qubit trapped-ion analog quantum simulator and numerically using models of up to five qubits.