Hi all,
Tomorrow Sven Jandura will tell us about his semester project at IBM, entitled "Time Propagation of a Wave Packet using a Variational Quantum Simulator". See below for the abstract. The zoom link is https://ethz.zoom.us/j/362994444.
Best,
-joe
Abstract: Quantum computers can speed up the calculation of the time evolution of quantum states, a task that is classically hard because just storing the wavefunction of a state of multiple particles requires resources exponential in the number of particles. Here we present a variational hybrid quantum-classical algorithm based on McLachlans variational principle that approximates the time evolution of particles moving in arbitrary potentials. We then numerically study the performance of this algorithm on a free Gaussian wave packet in one dimension and the scattering of a Gaussian wave packet on an Eckart barrier. We find that for a free particle the number of parameters in the variational form used by us can be significantly smaller than the real dimension of the Hilber space, while for the Eckart barrier it has to be close to the real dimension of the Hilbert space to obtain an high fidelity approximation.