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Ph.D. Thesis - Physics

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gram of an ultracold Fermi gas with respect to temperature and spin polarization [SSSK08].<br />

It is even possible in theory to simulate quantum magnetism in a neutral atom system by<br />

tuning the optical lattice strength [DDL03]. However, such a system has not yet been<br />

realized, in part due to the very low temperatures required to observe it [BDZ08].<br />

Analog simulations offer distinct advantages. In the case of optical lattices, one may<br />

find that the Hamiltonian governing the particles is also an interesting Hamiltonian to<br />

simulate, e.g. a Bose-Hubbard model. This is not true in every case, and sometimes other<br />

forces are added, i.e. in Ref. [JSG + 08]. Nevertheless, analog simulations provide a route<br />

to studying many-body phenomena without requiring the degree of control available in a<br />

digital quantum simulator.<br />

The advantages of analog simulation also differ from system to system. One difference<br />

between the neutral atom and ion trap implementations of the Bose-Hubbard model is the<br />

individual control over ions that ion traps offer. For instance, in the proposal of Porras and<br />

Cirac [PC04a], it is possible to adjust the trapping potentials to create site-specific interac-<br />

tions. Although still analog, such control permits a wider variety of simulated Hamiltonians<br />

than neutral atom BEC’s. The advantage, by contrast, of the optical lattice experiments<br />

is the ability to rapidly incorporate many bosons in many (O(10 5 )) sites [GME + 02], a<br />

situation that has not yet been realized in ion traps.<br />

The analog approach also has some drawbacks. For one, the ability of an experimenter<br />

to control the Hamiltonian is generally more constrained than it is for digital simulations.<br />

For instance, in the above optical lattice experiments, both the “onsite” terms, which de-<br />

scribe repulsion between atoms at the same site, and the “hopping” terms, which describe<br />

motion of atoms from site to site, depend on the depth of the optical lattice U. Chang-<br />

ing this depth changes the ratio of onsite to hopping interaction strengths, which is what<br />

permits observation of interesting phenomena, e.g. phase transitions. However, the acces-<br />

sible regions of parameter space are also constrained by U. Another drawback of analog<br />

quantum simulation is that quantum error correction (if needed) is not possible. Digital<br />

quantum simulations, by contrast, are seen to be both more general and more robust, but<br />

also significantly more difficult to implement.<br />

1.3.3 Comparison of digital and analog quantum simulation<br />

We would now like to compare the digital and analog approaches for both classical and<br />

quantum simulation of quantum mechanical systems. The main question is the resource<br />

requirements, in both space and time, required to perform a given simulation. In the<br />

examples below, we will consider a simulation of the dynamics of a system of n spin-1/2<br />

systems (qubits). In this section, we also focus entirely on the dynamics of the system,<br />

neglecting for the time being the resources needed to extract the answer.<br />

We begin with classical simulation. What resources are required to simulate n qubits on<br />

a classical computer? In the digital case, the dimension of the state vector is 2 n , which is<br />

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