Speaker
Description
Quantum computing offers a fundamentally new paradigm for simulating the real-time dynamics of quantum many-body systems, overcoming the exponential scaling limitations of classical approaches. By encoding quantum states directly into qubits and leveraging entanglement as a computational resource, quantum algorithms can efficiently capture the complex correlations that govern nuclear reactions. This capability opens the door to accurate, first-principles simulations of reaction mechanisms, including strongly interacting and highly non-equilibrium regimes that remain intractable today. As quantum hardware and algorithms mature, they have the potential to transform our understanding of nuclear dynamics, enabling predictive modeling with unprecedented fidelity.
Realizing this potential requires a sequence of algorithmic components, including efficient preparation of the initial nuclear wavefunction [1,2], controlled time evolution under the relevant Hamiltonian, and the extraction of physical observables through carefully designed measurement protocols. Each of these stages presents distinct challenges, from encoding correlated initial states to mitigating errors during long-time evolution and reconstructing scattering information from quantum measurements. To accurately describe continuum dynamics and reaction products, it is advantageous to employ first-quantized representations, which scale favorably with system size and provide a natural framework for asymptotic state represenation, while requiring explicit enforcement of fermionic antisymmetry [3,4].
In this talk, I present a unified framework for quantum simulation of nuclear reactions, spanning both state preparation and observable extraction. I discuss projection-based techniques for preparing nuclear states with well-defined quantum numbers and correlations, viewing state preparation itself as a form of time evolution [1,2]. Building on these methods, I introduce an approach in which scattering clusters are initialized as wave packets and evolved to asymptotic separation within a finite computational volume [5]. By computing appropriate overlap functions, scattering matrix elements at fixed energy can be obtained via Fourier transform. This strategy requires only unitary time evolution beyond state preparation, making it well suited for implementation on quantum hardware.
I will show how this framework enables the ab initio calculation of differential and total cross sections for two-cluster reactions, including inelastic processes where clusters transition between internal eigenstates [5]. Numerical examples illustrating these capabilities will be presented.
Acknowledgment: LA-UR-26-22966. This work was carried out under the auspices of the National Nuclear Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy at Los Alamos National Laboratory under Contract No. 89233218CNA000001.
References:
[1] I. Stetcu, A. Baroni, and J. Carlson, Phys. Rev. C 105 (2022) 064308
[2] E. Rule, I. Stetcu, and J. Carlson, Phys. Rev. C 110 (2024) 064003
[3] E. Rule et al., Quantum 10 (2026) 2056
[4] I. Stetcu, arXiv:2512.16138
[5] E. Rule and I. Stetcu, arXiv:2603.26881