Quantum-enhanced Green's function Monte Carlo for excited states of nuclear shell model

Abstract

We present a hybrid quantum-classical Green's function Monte Carlo (GFMC) algorithm for estimating the excited states of the nuclear shell model. The conventional GFMC method, widely used to find the ground state of a quantum many-body system, is plagued by the sign problem, which leads to an exponentially increasing variance with the growth of system size and evolution time. This issue is typically mitigated by applying classical constraints but at the cost of introducing bias. Our approach uses quantum subspace diagonalization (QSD) on a quantum computer to prepare a quantum trial state, replacing the classical trial state in the GFMC process. We also incorporated a modified classical shadow technique in the implementation of QSD to optimize quantum resource utilization. Besides, we extend our hybrid GFMC algorithm to find the excited states of a given quantum system. Numerical results suggest our method largely enhances accuracy in determining excited state energies, offering an improvement over the conventional method.