Towards quantum simulation of extreme plasmas

Quantum Simulation is a new computing paradigm that promises significant speedups over classical simulation. The quantum algorithms can natively be applied to only certain kind of problems, which are described through the Schrödinger equation. Recently, some new solutions have been proposed that map non-Hermitian and non-linear problems to quantum circuits, which could potentially boost plasma physics research in this area.

Current quantum hardware is too noisy to perform standard simulations over more than ~15 qubits and ~100 gates, leading current research to focus on toy problems. A possible way forward for the near-term quantum computers is to use the Variational algorithms, which present three main advantages: their circuits are shorter than in regular Hamiltonian simulation, they allow for reconstruction of the wavefunction at each timestep and they can be extended to nonlinear dynamics. In this work we apply this variational approach to simulate an extreme plasma physics problem, which is inherently non-linear in its nature.