Content area
Quantum computers have proven to be effective in simulating many quantum systems. Simulating nuclear processes and state preparation poses significant challenges, even for traditional supercomputers. This study demonstrates the feasibility of a complete simulation of a nuclear transition, including the preparation of both ground and first excited states. To tackle the complexity of strong interactions between two and three nucleons, the states are modeled on the tritium nucleus. Both the initial and final states are represented using quantum circuits with variational quantum algorithms and inductive biases. Describing the spin-isospin states requires four qubits, and a parameterized quantum circuit that exploits a total of 16 parameters is initialized. The estimated energy has a relative error of approximately 2% for the ground state and about 10% for the first excited state of the system. The simulation estimates the transition probability between the two states as a function of the dipole polarization angle. This work marks a first step towards leveraging digital quantum computers to simulate nuclear physics.