Enabling Fermionic Quantum Processing for Chemistry

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The determination of ground states of many interacting fermions is a key application for future quantum computers with significant implications for the design of new materials and the prediction of reaction pathways in chemistry. Recently, we put forward the proposal Simulating Chemistry with Fermionic Optical Superlattices, establishing ultracold fermions in optical lattices as a promising computational platform for this task. This approach uses the hard-wired fermionic symmetries of ultracold atoms to potentially outperform spin-based quantum computers. The project FermiChem will turn this theoretical proposal into application and enable the first experimental demonstration of fermionic quantum processing with ultracold atoms. We will pursue three aims: (1) To generate fermionic quantum circuits for measuring arbitrary correlation functions for condensed matter; (2) To provide computer code to connect our UniRand fermionic quantum simulator to high-level programming languages and to execute such fermionic circuits in hardware; (3) To validate the design of a new type of tweezer architecture with dramatically enhanced motional coherence properties. Together, these innovations will establish a full stack for fermionic computing and translate our proposal for computation with fermionic circuits in superlattices into experiments with real-world applications. Our work will be embedded in a network of collaborations with academic and industry partners in order to guide the development of soft- and hardware towards fermionic quantum computation. FermiChem will point the way towards using fermionic quantum systems for industry-relevant problems in chemistry and material science.