A nine-qubit cluster on Rigetti’s 84-qubit Ankaa-3 reproduced plasma wave dispersion and reflection across varying densities in a noiseless surrogate spin-model simulation published in Physical Review Applied.
Dual error-mitigation routines made the result possible: randomized compilation turned coherent two-qubit gate errors into stochastic noise, and a linear-regression model rescaled decaying amplitudes to recover cleaner wave-packet signals.
The team mapped plasma density profiles into tunable microwave pulses on Ankaa-3’s transmon lattice, letting it track wave propagation from empty-space conditions to overdense reflection thresholds with a hardware-efficient local spin lattice.
Rigetti, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of Colorado Boulder said the approach targets plasma regimes that strain classical supercomputers and could support future studies of non-equilibrium, non-linear quantum plasma dynamics.