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arXiv:1311.2555 · Physical Review A

Hamiltonian gadgets with reduced resource requirements

Yudong Cao, Ryan Babbush, Jacob Biamonte, Sabre Kais

Published Jan 12, 2015• 35 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Application of the adiabatic model of quantum computation requires efficient encoding of the solution to computational problems into the lowest eigenstate of a Hamiltonian that supports universal adiabatic quantum computation. Experimental systems are typically limited to restricted forms of two-body interactions. Therefore, universal adiabatic quantum computation requires a method for approximating quantum many-body Hamiltonians up to arbitrary spectral error using at most two-body interactions. Hamiltonian gadgets, introduced around a decade ago, offer the only current means to address this requirement. Although the applications of Hamiltonian gadgets have steadily grown since their introduction, little progress has been made in overcoming the limitations of the gadgets themselves. In this experimentally motivated theoretical study, we introduce several gadgets which require significantly more realistic control parameters than similar gadgets in the literature. We employ analytical techniques which result in a reduction of the resource scaling as a function of spectral error for the commonly used subdivision, three- to two-body and $k$-body gadgets. Accordingly, our improvements reduce the resource requirements of all proofs and experimental proposals making use of these common gadgets. Next, we numerically optimize these gadgets to illustrate the tightness of our analytical bounds. Finally, we introduce a gadget that simulates a $YY$ interaction term using Hamiltonians containing only ${X,Z,XX,ZZ}$ terms. Apart from possible implications in a theoretical context, this work could also be useful for a first experimental implementation of these key building blocks by requiring less control precision without introducing extra ancillary qubits.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.91.012315

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Application of the adiabatic model of quantum computation requires efficient encoding of the solution to computational problems into the lowest eigenstate of a Hamiltonian that supports universal adiabatic quantum computation. Experimental systems are typically limited to restricted forms of two-body interactions. Therefore, universal adiabatic quantum computation requires a method for approximating quantum many-body Hamiltonians up to arbitrary spectral error using at most two-body interactions. Hamiltonian gadgets, introduced around a decade ago, offer the only current means to address this requirement. Although the applications of Hamiltonian gadgets have steadily grown since their introduction, little progress has been made in overcoming the limitations of the gadgets themselves. In this experimentally motivated theoretical study, we introduce several gadgets which require significantly more realistic control parameters than similar gadgets in the literature. We employ analytical techniques which result in a reduction of the resource scaling as a function of spectral error for the commonly used subdivision, three- to two-body and kkk-body gadgets. Accordingly, our improvements reduce the resource requirements of all proofs and experimental proposals making use of these common gadgets. Next, we numerically optimize these gadgets to illustrate the tightness of our analytical bounds. Finally, we introduce a gadget that simulates a YYYYYY interaction term using Hamiltonians containing only X,Z,XX,ZZ{X,Z,XX,ZZ}X,Z,XX,ZZ terms. Apart from possible implications in a theoretical context, this work could also be useful for a first experimental implementation of these key building blocks by requiring less control precision without introducing extra ancillary qubits.
A resource efficient method by which the ground‐state of an arbitrary k‐local, optimization Hamiltonian can be encoded as the ground‐state of a ‐local, optimization Hamiltonian is developed. This result is important because adiabatic quantum algorithms are often most easily formulated using many‐body interactions but experimentally available interactions are generally 2‐body. In this context, the efficiency of a reduction gadget is measured by the number of ancilla qubits required as well as the amount of control precision needed to implement the resulting Hamiltonian. First, methods of applying these gadgets to obtain 2‐local Hamiltonians using the least possible number of ancilla qubits are optimized. Next, a novel reduction gadget which minimizes control precision and a heuristic which uses this gadget to compile 3‐local problems with a significant reduction in control precision are shown. Finally, numerics are presented which indicate a substantial decrease in the resources required to implement randomly generated, 3‐body optimization Hamiltonians when compared to other methods in the literature.
Perturbative gadgets are a tool to encode part of a Hamiltonian, usually the low-energy subspace, into a different Hamiltonian with favorable properties, for instance, reduced locality. Many constructions of perturbative gadgets have been proposed over the years. Still, all of them are restricted in some ways: Either they apply to some specific classes of Hamiltonians, they involve recursion to reduce locality, or they are limited to studying time evolution under the gadget Hamiltonian, e.g., in the context of adiabatic quantum computing, and thus involve subspace restrictions. In this work, we fill the gap by introducing a versatile universal, nonrecursive, nonadiabatic perturbative gadget construction without subspace restrictions, that encodes an arbitrary many-body Hamiltonian into the low-energy subspace of a three-body Hamiltonian and is therefore applicable to gate-based quantum computing. Our construction requires rkrkrk additional qubits for a kkk-body Hamiltonian comprising rrr terms. Besides a specific gadget construction, we also provide a recipe for constructing similar gadgets, which can be tailored to different properties, which we discuss.
Perturbative gadgets are used to construct a quantum Hamiltonian whose low-energy subspace approximates a given quantum kkk-local Hamiltonian up to an absolute error ϵ\epsilonϵ. Typically, gadget constructions involve terms with large interaction strengths of order poly(ϵ−1)\text{poly}(\epsilon^{-1})poly(ϵ−1). Here we present a 2-body gadget construction and prove that it approximates a Hamiltonian of interaction strength γ=O(1)\gamma = O(1)γ=O(1) up to absolute error ϵ≪γ\epsilon\ll\gammaϵ≪γ using interactions of strength O(ϵ)O(\epsilon)O(ϵ) instead of the usual inverse polynomial in ϵ\epsilonϵ. A key component in our proof is a new condition for the convergence of the perturbation series, allowing our gadget construction to be applied in parallel on multiple many-body terms. We also discuss how to apply this gadget construction for approximating 3- and kkk-local Hamiltonians. The price we pay for using much weaker interactions is a large overhead in the number of ancillary qubits, and the number of interaction terms per particle, both of which scale as O(poly(ϵ−1))O(\text{poly}(\epsilon^{-1}))O(poly(ϵ−1)). Our strong-from-weak gadgets have their primary application in complexity theory (QMA hardness of restricted Hamiltonians, a generalized area law counterexample, gap amplification), but could also motivate practical implementations with several weak interactions simulating a much stronger quantum many-body interaction.
Perturbative gadgets are general techniques for reducing many-body spin interactions to two-body ones using perturbation theory. This allows for potential realization of effective many-body interactions using more physically viable two-body ones. In parallel with prior work (arXiv:1311.2555 [quant-ph]), here we consider minimizing the physical resource required for implementing the gadgets initially proposed by Kempe, Kitaev and Regev (arXiv:quant-ph/0406180) and later generalized by Jordan and Farhi (arXiv:0802.1874v4). The main innovation of our result is a set of methods that efficiently compute tight upper bounds to errors in the perturbation theory. We show that in cases where the terms in the target Hamiltonian commute, the bounds produced by our algorithm are sharp for arbitrary order perturbation theory. We provide numerics which show orders of magnitudes improvement over gadget constructions based on trivial upper bounds for the error term in the perturbation series. We also discuss further improvement of our result by adopting the Schrieffer-Wolff formalism of perturbation theory and supplement our observation with numerical results.
The introduction of two-body XX interactions has been shown to improve the performance of quantum annealing in solving certain combinatorial optimisation problems and would enable the simulation of a broader class of many-body Hamiltonians. Due to experimental constraints, such interactions are typically not natively available on analogue quantum devices. To overcome this limitation we introduce the truss gadget. This is an exact construction that generates two-body XX interactions using only one-body X and Z fields and two-body ZZ interactions which are readily accessible on, for instance, superconducting quantum annealers. We experimentally validate the construction by reproducing the dynamics of a target XX Hamiltonian on a trapped-ion quantum processor. We then apply the gadget to an illustrative set of instances of the weighted maximum-independent-set problem on a superconducting quantum annealer. We empirically determine an approximate thousand-fold improvement in the probability of finding a state close to the ground state for these instances, over implementation without an XX interaction.
The need for Hamiltonians with many-body interactions arises in various applications of quantum computing. However, interactions beyond two-body are difficult to realize experimentally. Perturbative gadgets were introduced to obtain arbitrary many-body effective interactions using Hamiltonians with at most two-body interactions. Although valid for arbitrary kkk-body interactions, their use is limited to small kkk because the strength of interaction is kthk\mathrm{th}kth order in perturbation theory. In this paper we develop a nonperturbative technique for obtaining effective kkk-body interactions using Hamiltonians consisting of at most lll-body interactions with l<kl<kl<k. The idea is to first apply a unitary transformation on the system plus ancilla qubits (possibly using a gate-based device), then evolve with a new Hamiltonian which is more local than the original one (using an analog device), and finally reverse the unitary transformation. The net effect of this procedure is shown to be equivalent to evolving the system with the original nonlocal Hamiltonian. This technique does not suffer from the aforementioned shortcoming of perturbative methods and requires only one ancilla qubit for each kkk-body interaction irrespective of the value of kkk. It works best for Hamiltonians with a few many-body interactions involving a large number of qubits and can be used together with perturbative gadgets to embed Hamiltonians of considerable complexity in proper subspaces of two-local Hamiltonians. We describe how our technique can be implemented in a hybrid (gate-based and adiabatic) as well as solely adiabatic quantum computing scheme.