Qubit encodings for lattices of dipolar planar rotors

Near term quantum devices have recently garnered significant interest as promising candidates for investigating difficult-to-probe regimes in many-body physics. To this end, various qubit encoding schemes targeting second quantized Hamiltonians have been proposed and optimized. In this study, we investigate two qubit representations of the planar rotor lattice Hamiltonian. The first representation is realized by decomposing the rotor Hamiltonian projectors in binary and mapping them to spin-1/2 projectors. The second approach relies on embedding the planar rotor lattice Hilbert space in a larger space and recovering the relevant qubit encoded system as a quotient space projecting down to the physical degrees of freedom. This is typically called the unary mapping and is used for bosonic systems. We establish the veracity of the two encoding approaches using sparse diagonalization on small chains and discuss quantum phase estimation resource requirements to simulate small planar rotor lattices on near-term quantum devices. We also examine the utility of variational approaches for simulating planar rotor chains using these encodings.