Harriet Apel, Athena Caesura, Carys Harvey, Sam Heavey, Angus Kan, Jessica Lemieux, Ryan Levy, Sam Pallister, Joseph Peetz, William Pol, Sukin Sim, William A. Simon, Mark Steudtner, Gideon Uchehara (Sep 07 2026).
Abstract: As quantum computing enters the early fault-tolerant era, circuit compilation choices will increasingly depend on details of the underlying architecture rather than solely optimizing for generic proxies such as non-Clifford count. We present an active-volume-aware compilation of the ground-state energy estimation algorithm for the two-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model using quantum phase estimation and Trotterized time evolution. The proposed compilation reduces the active volume across
L×L square lattices with
L=4 to
20, achieving up to a
3.9× reduction over prior work optimized for non-Clifford cost. As a by-product of these compilation improvements, the resulting circuits also achieve state-of-the-art Toffoli counts, with a ~
2× reduction for the
L=20 case. Lastly, the active volume architecture and recent execution scheduling advances provide a means of translating these reduction trends into runtime. This demonstrates the increasing importance of architecture-aware compilation for practical early fault-tolerant quantum computing.
