Quantum computation of stopping power for inertial fusion target design

First-principles stopping power calculations are some of the most computationally demanding calculations that are used to inform the microphysics models used in target design. They are challenging because they involve the time dynamics of large systems far from equilibrium, with accuracies that are especially difficult to assess in the warm dense matter regime. We will describe a protocol for using a fault-tolerant quantum computer to calculate electronic stopping power from a first-quantized plane-wave basis representation of the target electrons and projectile nucleus. Our approach builds on the electronic structure block encodings of Su, et al. [1], adapting and optimizing those algorithms to estimate the projectile’s energy loss from the non-Born-Oppenheimer dynamics of multiple particle species at finite temperature. We estimate the logical qubit requirements and leading-order Toffoli costs for computing the stopping power of various projectile/target combinations relevant to interpreting and designing high-energy-density experiments.



[1] Y. Su, et al., “Fault-tolerant quantum simulations of quantum chemistry in first quantization”, Physical Review X Quantum 2, 040332 (2021)