Quasiparticle pairing encoding of atomic nuclei for quantum annealing

Abstract: Quantum computing is emerging as a promising tool in nuclear physics. However, the cost of encoding fermionic operators hampers the application of algorithms in current noisy quantum devices. In this work, we analyze an encoding scheme based on pairing nucleon modes. This approach significantly reduces the complexity of the encoding, while maintaining a high accuracy for the ground states of semimagic nuclei across the $sd$ and $pf$ shells and for tin isotopes. In addition, we also explore the encoding ability to describe open-shell nuclei within the above configuration spaces. When this scheme is applied to a trotterized quantum adiabatic evolution, our results demonstrate a computational advantage of up to three orders of magnitude in CNOT gate count compared to the standard Jordan-Wigner encoding. Our approach paves the way for efficient quantum simulations of nuclear structure using quantum annealing, with applications to both digital and hybrid quantum computing platforms.