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One-dimensional QDO Hamiltonian
In this tutorial, we consider a non-dimensional Hamiltonian for one-dimensional QDOs which are interacting via quadratic coupling. where and are the bosonic position and momentum operators for oscillator and is the coupling between oscillators and . For simplicity, we assume that all one-dimensional QDOs are identical and aligned parallel to each other and along the inter-oscillator axis, equally separated by distance . In this case, the coupling constant is given by , where is the dipole polarisability. We need to represent this Hamiltonian in terms of Pauli matrices to be able to implement on quantum circuit. Unlike fermions, bosonic Fock states cannot be represented by only zeros and ones. Therefore, when bosons occupy a certain quantum state, we need to encode this by representing the number as a binary string in the qubit state. In this tutorial, we denote a Fock state expressed in decimal as (with an underline), and a Fock state in binary representation as (without an underline). Here, represents the binary representation of , and denotes the -th bit from the right of the bitstring. When adopting this binary encoding, there is an upper limit to the number of bosons that can occupy the same quantum state. If we allocate qubits to the Fock state of each boson, the possible values range from 0 to . We define the number of levels we can handle as . must be large enough to make the result as reliable as possible. Although not used in this tutorial, Classiq’sQNum could potentially handle such bosonic Fock states more intuitively.
The bosonic position and momentum operators can be written using ladder operators as:
where the ladder operators are expressed using projection operators as follows:
What does this projection operator look like in binary representation? Let’s take with a bit length of as an example. In this case, the projection operator is:
As we can see, the operator can be divided into three parts:
- For the bits where ones continue from the position, apply .
- For the rightmost zero, apply .
- For all other bits, there is no change, so apply or .
Output:
Output:
Output:
Calculate the ground state energy of one-dimensional QDO Hamiltonian
Here, we compute the ground state energy using the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE).Output:
Output:

Output:
Output:



Calculating many-body dispersion effect
Now that we know the exact London dispersion energy of two identical parallel QDOs along the inter-oscillator axis is where , we might expect that adding a third QDO would result in a simple summation of these pairwise interactions. Under this assumption, the total dispersion energy for a linear chain of three QDOs (with a distance between neighbors) would be given by: where . Let’s compare this to the results obtained by diagonalizing the Hamiltonian for .Output:
Output:
Output:
