Quantum Monte Carlo tunneling from quantum chemistry to quantum annealing

Quantum tunneling is ubiquitous across different fields, from quantum chemical reactions and magnetic materials to quantum simulators and quantum computers. While simulating the real-time quantum dynamics of tunneling is infeasible for high-dimensional systems, quantum tunneling also shows up in qua...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review. B 2017-10, Vol.96 (13), Article 134305
Main Authors: Mazzola, Guglielmo, Smelyanskiy, Vadim N., Troyer, Matthias
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Chemical reactions
Combinatorial analysis
Computer simulation
Continuity (mathematics)
Magnetic materials
Organic chemistry
Quantum chemistry
Quantum computers
Quantum statistics
Quantum tunnelling
Simulators
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Summary:Quantum tunneling is ubiquitous across different fields, from quantum chemical reactions and magnetic materials to quantum simulators and quantum computers. While simulating the real-time quantum dynamics of tunneling is infeasible for high-dimensional systems, quantum tunneling also shows up in quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations, which aim to simulate quantum statistics with resources growing only polynomially with the system size. Here we extend the recent results obtained for quantum spin models [Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 180402 (2016)], and we study continuous-variable models for proton transfer reactions. We demonstrate that QMC simulations efficiently recover the scaling of ground-state tunneling rates due to the existence of an instanton path, which always connects the reactant state with the product. We discuss the implications of our results in the context of quantum chemical reactions and quantum annealing, where quantum tunneling is expected to be a valuable resource for solving combinatorial optimization problems.
ISSN:2469-9950
2469-9969
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevB.96.134305