In collaboration with the U.S. Naval Nuclear Laboratory, this project developed large-scale benchmarking experiments to evaluate the performance of quantum computers on physically meaningful nuclear simulation problems. The study focused on the Lipkin–Meshkov–Glick model (LMG model), a widely used theoretical framework for studying collective interactions in many-body nuclear systems.

The LMG model provides a controlled yet non-trivial setting for testing algorithms designed to simulate strongly correlated nuclear systems, making it an ideal candidate for cross-platform performance evaluation. The WISER team performed Large-scale numerical simulations on the Perlmutter Supercomputer, and compared against executions on the IBM quantum hardware. This enabled a systematic assessment of algorithmic scalability, noise sensitivity, and resource requirements across classical and quantum architectures. The project represents one of the largest benchmarking efforts to date for nuclear many-body models on quantum devices.

WISER Research Fellows: Jerimiah Wright, Rushil Dandamudi, Maggie Bao, Joan Arrow