Fermion-qubit mappings
In order to simulate the dynamics of physical systems with a quantum computer, it is necessary to map the Hamiltonian of an electron to the qubit counterpart. Hamiltonians for fermionic systems, as typically used in quantum chemistry, are often expressed using anti-commuting creation and annihilation operators: , under second quantization. If we can rewrite the creation and annihilation operators as Pauli operators that can act on qubits, we can represent them on a quantum computer.
Here, , satisfy the anti-commutation relations:
and , denote the label of degree of freedom the operator acts on.
Fermionic wavefunctions exhibit antisymmetry, but when mapping directly from spin orbitals to qubits on a quantum computer, where the presence of an electron in a spin orbital is represented as and the absence as , this antisymmetry is not maintained. This discrepancy arises because electrons are indistinguishable particles, whereas qubits are distinguishable. To correctly emulate the behavior of fermions, several mapping techniques have been developed that preserve the necessary anti-commutation relations.
In this tutorial, we explain how to perform mapping from OpenFermion
's FermionOperator
to QURI Parts Operator
, where we provide 3 types of mapping:
- Jordan-Wigner mapping
- Bravyi-Kitaev mapping
- Symmetry-conserving Bravyi-Kitaev mapping