Andrii O. Maksymov

Ion-trap quantum computers offer a large number of possible qubit couplings, each of which requires individual calibration and can be misconfigured. To enhance the duty cycle of an ion trap, we develop a strategy that diagnoses individual miscalibrated couplings using only log-many tests. This strategy is validated on a commercial ion-trap quantum computer, where we illustrate the process of debugging faulty quantum gates. Our methodology provides a scalable pathway towards fault detections on a larger scale ion-trap quantum computers, confirmed by simulations up to 32 qubits.

Quantum computers have the potential to advance material design and drug discovery by performing costly electronic structure calculations. A critical aspect of this application requires optimizing the limited resources of the quantum hardware. Here, we experimentally demonstrate an end-to-end pipeline that focuses on minimizing quantum resources while maintaining accuracy. Using density matrix embedding theory as a problem decomposition technique, and an ion-trap quantum computer, we simulate a ring of 10 hydrogen atoms without freezing any electrons. The originally 20-qubit system is decomposed into 10 two-qubit problems, making it amenable to currently available hardware. Combining this decomposition with a qubit coupled cluster circuit ansatz, circuit optimization, and density matrix purification, we accurately reproduce the potential energy curve in agreement with the full configuration interaction energy in the minimal basis set. Our experimental results are an early demonstration of the potential for problem decomposition to accurately simulate large molecules on quantum hardware.

We investigate many-body localization in the chain of interacting spins with a transverse power-law interaction, $J_{0}/r^α$, and random on-site potentials, $φ_i \in \left(-W/2,W/2\right)$, in the long-range limit, $α< 3/2$, which has been recently examined experimentally on trapped ions. The many-body localization threshold is characterized by the critical disordering, $W_c$, which separates localized ($W > W_c$) and chaotic ($W < W_c$) phases. Using the analysis of the instability of localized states with respect to resonant interactions complemented by numerical finite size scaling, we show that the critical disordering scales with the number of spins, $N$, as $W_c \approx [1.37 J_{0}/(4/3 - α)]N^{4/3 - α} \ln N$ for $0 < α\leq 1$, and as $W_c \approx [J_{0}/(1-2α/3)]N^{1-2α/3} \ln^{2/3} N$ for $1 < α< 3/2$ while the transition width scales as $σ_{W} \propto W_{c}/N$. We use this result to predict the spin long-term evolution for a very large number of spins ($N = 50$), inaccessible for exact diagonalization, and to suggest the rescaling of hopping interaction with the system size to attain the localization transition at finite disordering in the thermodynamic limit of infinite number of spins.