6–11 Dec 2026
Stellenbosch University
Africa/Johannesburg timezone

A hybrid quantum-classical particle-in-cell method for plasma simulations

Not scheduled
20m
Jan Mouton Learning Centre (Stellenbosch University)

Jan Mouton Learning Centre

Stellenbosch University

Poster Variational QML

Speaker

Pratibha Raghupati Hegde (International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad)

Description

We present a hybrid quantum-classical electrostatic Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method, where the electrostatic field Poisson solver is implemented on a quantum computer simulator using a hybrid classical-quantum Neural Network (HNN) using data-driven and physics-informed learning approaches. The HNN is trained on classical PIC simulation results and executed via a PennyLane quantum simulator. The remaining computational steps, including particle motion and field interpolation, are performed on a classical system. To evaluate the accuracy and computational cost of this hybrid approach, we test the hybrid quantum-classical electrostatic PIC against the two-stream instability, a standard benchmark in plasma physics. Our results show that the quantum Poisson solver achieves comparable accuracy to classical methods. It also provides insights into the feasibility of using quantum computing and HNNs for plasma simulations. We also discuss the computational overhead associated with current quantum computer simulators, showing the challenges and potential advantages of hybrid quantum-classical numerical methods.

Topic Hybrid quantum-classical approaches for learning and optimization

Author

Pratibha Raghupati Hegde (International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad)

Co-authors

Presentation materials