Simulating Electron - Phonon Processes with Photonics

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Quantum computing promises to revolutionise the field of computational chemistry by providing computers which scale exponentially in size along with the systems they aim to model. However, whilst many promising algorithms for performing computational chemistry calculations on quantum computers have been proposed most of these require qubit and gate counts far beyond what is currently available experimentally. Additionally, whilst many different architectures for implementing quantum technologies exist, photonics, the process of manipulating individual photons, has established itself as one of the leading architectures for providing near term quantum advantage. Techniques such as boson and gaussian boson sampling offer clear routes to quantum advantage with relatively low experimental overheads. With this project we hope to build algorithms which can utilise the relative experimental simplicity of photonics in order to provide near term quantum advantage for computational chemistry. The objective of the project is to propose algorithms useful for computational chemistry which can be implemented on near term quantum photonic devices. In this project we look to build on previous work which has shown the applicability of techniques such as gaussian boson sampling to quantum chemistry to propose algorithms which find more general applicability for quantum chemistry, particularly those in electronic structure theory and electron-boson structure theory. Electron - phonon interactions are posited to be responsible for a wide range of phenomena however simulating and predicting them from ab-initio methods remains challenging. We hope to propose ways in which low experimental cost techniques can be used to simulate these systems and thus offer new insights into their working. We aim to exploit techniques native to quantum photonics to propose analog style quantum devices which can be used to simulate quantum chemistry without the need to large qubit / gate counts. Previous work has shown that gaussian boson sampling can be used to simulate the vibrational spectra of molecules whereas here we look to see whether boson sampling (and other related techniques) can be applied to more broader problems in computational chemistry. Photonics offers a fantastic "toolbox" of techniques which we hope to find ways to apply to computational chemistry in the hopes of providing algorithms with near term implementations. Throughout this project we hope to collaborate with photonic hardware groups and companies to implement our proposed algorithms. We are currently involved with a collaboration with Duality Quantum Photonics to implement a novel algorithm for solving problems in electronic structure theory with linear optics and hope to continue the collaboration throughout the project. This project falls within the EPSRC quantum technologies research area.