Simulating Chemical Dynamics on Analog Quantum Computers

Abstract

Accurately simulating molecular dynamics during chemical reactions remains a central challenge in computational chemistry. These processes are inherently quantum mechanical, involving coupled electronic and nuclear motion and non-adiabatic effects. A fully quantum description is therefore required, yet the associated computational cost grows exponentially with system size. Even with modern supercomputers, storing and evolving a molecular wavefunction rapidly becomes intractable, limiting exact simulations of chemical dynamics.

Quantum simulation offers a promising alternative by using controllable quantum systems to directly reproduce molecular dynamics. However, fully digital, qubit-based approaches remain impractical for chemistry due to limited qubit numbers, coherence times, and gate fidelities. This motivates the exploration of more resource-efficient quantum architectures.

In this thesis, we demonstrate that mixed-qudit-boson (MQB) quantum simulators provide a practical platform for simulating chemical dynamics in the quantum regime. In MQB devices, multilevel qudits encode electronic states while bosonic modes natively represent vibrational degrees of freedom, avoiding costly qubit encodings of nuclear motion and substantially reducing resource requirements.

The thesis makes three main contributions. First, it reports the direct observation of geometric-phase interference in non-adiabatic dynamics using an MQB simulation of the Jahn–Teller model. Second, it extends the MQB framework to open-system chemical dynamics through programmable Lindblad dissipation. Third, it presents a resource analysis showing that MQB simulators can reduce resource costs by several orders of magnitude relative to qubit-only approaches.

Together, these results establish MQB quantum simulators as a promising route for studying chemical dynamics beyond the reach of classical computation.