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arXiv:0903.3465 · Journal of International Crisis and Risk Communication Research

Efficient Circuits for Quantum Walks

Chen-Fu Chiang, Daniel Nagaj, Paweł Wocjan

Published Mar 20, 2009• 3 citations
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Abstract

We present an efficient general method for realizing a quantum walk operator corresponding to an arbitrary sparse classical random walk. Our approach is based on Grover and Rudolph's method for preparing coherent versions of efficiently integrable probability distributions. This method is intended for use in quantum walk algorithms with polynomial speedups, whose complexity is usually measured in terms of how many times we have to apply a step of a quantum walk, compared to the number of necessary classical Markov chain steps. We consider a finer notion of complexity including the number of elementary gates it takes to implement each step of the quantum walk with some desired accuracy. The difference in complexity for various implementation approaches is that our method scales linearly in the sparsity parameter and poly-logarithmically with the inverse of the desired precision. The best previously known general methods either scale quadratically in the sparsity parameter, or polynomially in the inverse precision. Our approach is especially relevant for implementing quantum walks corresponding to classical random walks like those used in the classical algorithms for approximating permanents and sampling from binary contingency tables. In those algorithms, the sparsity parameter grows with the problem size, while maintaining high precision is required.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.0903.3465

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We present an efficient general method for realizing a quantum walk operator corresponding to an arbitrary sparse classical random walk. Our approach is based on Grover and Rudolph's method for preparing coherent versions of efficiently integrable probability distributions. This method is intended for use in quantum walk algorithms with polynomial speedups, whose complexity is usually measured in terms of how many times we have to apply a step of a quantum walk, compared to the number of necessary classical Markov chain steps. We consider a finer notion of complexity including the number of elementary gates it takes to implement each step of the quantum walk with some desired accuracy. The difference in complexity for various implementation approaches is that our method scales linearly in the sparsity parameter and poly-logarithmically with the inverse of the desired precision. The best previously known general methods either scale quadratically in the sparsity parameter, or polynomially in the inverse precision. Our approach is especially relevant for implementing quantum walks corresponding to classical random walks like those used in the classical algorithms for approximating permanents and sampling from binary contingency tables. In those algorithms, the sparsity parameter grows with the problem size, while maintaining high precision is required.
We present an efficient general method for realizing a quantum walk operator corresponding to an arbitrary sparse classical random walk. Our approach is based on Grover and Rudolph's method for preparing coherent versions of efficiently integrable probability distributions \cite{GroverRudolph}. This method is intended for use in quantum walk algorithms with polynomial speedups, whose complexity is usually measured in terms of how many times we have to apply a step of a quantum walk \cite{Szegedy}, compared to the number of necessary classical Markov chain steps. We consider a finer notion of complexity including the number of elementary gates it takes to implement each step of the quantum walk with some desired accuracy. The difference in complexity for various implementation approaches is that our method scales linearly in the sparsity parameter and poly-logarithmically with the inverse of the desired precision. The best previously known general methods either scale quadratically in the sparsity parameter, or polynomially in the inverse precision. Our approach is especially relevant for implementing quantum walks corresponding to classical random walks like those used in the classical algorithms for approximating permanents \cite{Vigoda, Vazirani} and sampling from binary contingency tables \cite{Stefankovi}. In those algorithms, the sparsity parameter grows with the problem size, while maintaining high precision is required.
In this thesis, I investigate quantum walks in quantum computing from three aspects: the insights, the implementation, and the applications. Quantum walks are the quantum analogue of classical random walks. For the insights of quantum walks, I list and explain the required components for quantizing a classical random walk into a quantum walk. The components are, for instance, Markov chains, quantum phase estimation, and quantum spectrum theorem. I then demonstrate how the product of two reflections in the walk operator provides a quadratic speed-up, in comparison to the classical counterpart. For the implementation of quantum walks, I show the construction of an efficient circuit for realizing one single step of the quantum walk operator. Furthermore, I devise a more succinct circuit to approximately implement quantum phase estimation with constant precision controlled phase shift operators. From an implementation perspective, efficient circuits are always desirable because the realization of a phase shift operator with high precision would be a costly task and a critical obstacle. For the applications of quantum walks, I apply the quantum walk technique along with other fundamental quantum techniques, such as phase estimation, to solve the partition function problem. However, there might be some scenario in which the speed-up of spectral gap is insignificant. In a situation like that that, I provide an amplitude amplification-based iii approach to prepare the thermal Gibbs state. Such an approach is useful when the spectral gap is extremely small. Finally, I further investigate and explore the effect of noise (perturbation) on the performance of quantum walks
Abstract Szegedy’s quantization of a reversible Markov chain provides a quantum walk whose spectral gap is quadratically larger than that of the classical walk. Quantum computers are therefore expected to provide a speedup of Metropolis–Hastings (MH) simulations. Existing generic methods to implement the quantum walk require coherently computing the transition probabilities of the underlying Markov kernel. However, reversible computing methods require a number of qubits that scales with the complexity of the computation. This overhead is undesirable in near-term fault-tolerant quantum computing, where few logical qubits are available. In this work, we present a Szegedy quantum walk construction which follows the classical proposal-acceptance logic, and does not require further reversible computing methods. We also compare this construction with an alternative to Szegedy’s approach which also provides a quadratic gap amplification. Since each step of the quantum walks uses a constant number of proposal and acceptance steps, we expect the end-to-end quadratic speedup to hold for MH Markov Chain Monte-Carlo simulations.
Generating quantum circuits that prepare specific states is an essential part of quantum compilation. Algorithms that solve this problem for general states generate circuits at grow exponentially in the number of qubits. However, in contrast to general states, many practically relevant states are sparse in the standard basis. In this paper we show how sparsity can be used for efficient state preparation. We present a polynomial-time algorithm that generates polynomial-size quantum circuits (linear in the number of nonzero coefficients times number of qubits) that prepare given states, making computer-aided design of sparse state preparation scalable.
We present a quantum algorithm for simulating the dynamics of Hamiltonians that are not necessarily sparse. Our algorithm is based on the input model where the entries of the Hamiltonian are stored in a data structure in a quantum random access memory (qRAM) which allows for the efficient preparation of states that encode the rows of the Hamiltonian. We use a linear combination of quantum walks to achieve poly-logarithmic dependence on precision. The time complexity of our algorithm, measured in terms of the circuit depth, is O(t\sqrt{N}\norm{H}\,\polylog(N, t\norm{H}, 1/\epsilon)), where t is the evolution time, NNN is the dimension of the system, and ϵ\epsilonϵ is the error in the final state, which we call precision. Our algorithm can be directly applied as a subroutine for unitary implementation and quantum linear systems solvers, achieving \widetilde{O}(\sqrt{N}) dependence for both applications.