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Minisymposium Presentation
Exploration of Quantum Computing for Fusion Energy Science Applications
Presenter
Ilon Joseph is the Deputy Associate Program Leader for the Fusion Energy Sciences Program Theory and Modeling Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Ilon received his B.S. in Physics from Stanford University, his Ph.D. in Physics from Columbia University and worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the UCSD Center for Energy Research, stationed at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at General Atomics, before joining LLNL in 2008. Ilon is an expert in magnetic confinement fusion including edge plasma physics, magnetic reconnection, and kinetic closure models. He has worked on controlling chaos in dynamical systems, understanding how resonant magnetic perturbations improve the performance of tokamak fusion reactors, developing efficient fluid closures that incorporate kinetic effects, and extending gyrokinetic theory to the largest possible electric field gradients. Recently, Ilon has developed an interest in understanding how quantum information science and quantum computing can be used to accelerate progress in fusion energy.
Description
Quantum computing promises to deliver large gains in computational power that can potentially benefit a number of Fusion Energy Science (FES) application areas. We will review our recent efforts [1] to develop and extend quantum algorithms to perform both classical and quantum FES-relevant calculations, as well as to perform calculations on present-day quantum hardware platforms. We have developed and explored quantum algorithms that can compute nonlinear and non-Hamiltonian dynamics by simulating the Koopman-von Neumann and Liouville equations; perform eigenvalue estimation for generalized eigenvalue problems common in plasma physics and MHD theory; simulate nonlinear wave-wave interactions; and explore the chaotic dynamics of both quantum and classical systems. We have implemented toy models of these algorithms on state-of-the-art quantum computing architectures to test the fidelity of emerging quantum hardware capabilities including Grover’s search, nonlinear three-wave interactions, and the chaotic dynamics of the quantum sawtooth map, a simple model for wave-particle interactions. The fidelity of the experimental results match noise models that include decay and dephasing processes and highlights key differences between state-of-the-art approaches to quantum computing hardware platforms.
[1] I. Joseph, Y. Shi, M. D. Porter, et al., Phys. Plasmas 30, 010501 (2023).