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arXiv:1412.4687 · Physical Review Letters

Simulating Hamiltonian Dynamics with a Truncated Taylor Series

Dominic William Berry, Andrew M. Childs, Richard Cleve, Robin Kothari, Rolando D. Somma

Published Mar 3, 2015• 741 citations
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Abstract

We describe a simple, efficient method for simulating Hamiltonian dynamics on a quantum computer by approximating the truncated Taylor series of the evolution operator. Our method can simulate the time evolution of a wide variety of physical systems. As in another recent algorithm, the cost of our method depends only logarithmically on the inverse of the desired precision, which is optimal. However, we simplify the algorithm and its analysis by using a method for implementing linear combinations of unitary operations together with a robust form of oblivious amplitude amplification.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.114.090502

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We describe a simple, efficient method for simulating Hamiltonian dynamics on a quantum computer by approximating the truncated Taylor series of the evolution operator. Our method can simulate the time evolution of a wide variety of physical systems. As in another recent algorithm, the cost of our method depends only logarithmically on the inverse of the desired precision, which is optimal. However, we simplify the algorithm and its analysis by using a method for implementing linear combinations of unitary operations together with a robust form of oblivious amplitude amplification.
We provide a general method for efficiently simulating time-dependent Hamiltonian dynamics on a circuit-model-based quantum computer. Our approach is based on approximating the truncated Dyson series of the evolution operator, extending the earlier proposal by Berry et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 090502 (2015)] to evolution generated by explicitly time-dependent Hamiltonians. Two alternative strategies are proposed to implement time ordering while exploiting the superposition principle for sampling the Hamiltonian at different times. The resource cost of our simulation algorithm retains the optimal logarithmic dependence on the inverse of the desired precision.
We describe an improved version of the quantum algorithm for Hamiltonian simulation based on the implementation of a truncated Taylor series of the evolution operator. The idea is to add an extra step to the previously known algorithm which implements an operator that corrects the weightings of the Taylor series. This way, the desired accuracy is achieved with an improvement in the overall complexity of the algorithm. This quantum simulation method is applicable to a wide range of Hamiltonians of interest, including to quantum chemistry problems.
We propose an efficient quantum algorithm for simulating the dynamics of general Hamiltonian systems. Our technique is based on a power series expansion of the time-evolution operator in its off-diagonal terms. The expansion decouples the dynamics due to the diagonal component of the Hamiltonian from the dynamics generated by its off-diagonal part, which we encode using the linear combination of unitaries technique. Our method has an optimal dependence on the desired precision and, as we illustrate, generally requires considerably fewer resources than the current state-of-the-art. We provide an analysis of resource costs for several sample models.
As established in the seminal work by Berry et al.[1], expanding the time evolution operator using truncated Taylor series (up to some order KKK) makes a good candidate for simulating Hamiltonian dynamics. Here, we adapt the method but present an alternative quantum circuit that maintains an equivalent asymptotic elementary gate cost but has an exponentially reduced number of ancilla qubits. This is realized by utilizing mid-circuit measurements (with early abort-and-restart of circuit execution), and transforming a series of multi-controlled(Hk)(H^k)(Hk) to a series of singly-controlled(Hk′)(H^{k'})(Hk′), where HHH is a linear combination of unitaries and k,k′k, k'k,k′ are integers. The proposed circuit utilizes a total of ⌈log⁡(K)⌉+⌈log⁡(L)⌉+n\lceil \log(K) \rceil + \lceil \log(L) \rceil +n⌈log(K)⌉+⌈log(L)⌉+n qubits, where LLL is the number of terms in the Hamiltonian and nnn is the system qubit size. Our shorter width circuit with mid-measurements protocol is implemented and evaluated using the programming language Guppy[2,3].
We describe an improved version of the quantum simulation method based on the implementation of a truncated Taylor series of the evolution operator. The idea is to add an extra step to the previously known algorithm which implements an operator that corrects the weightings of the Taylor series. This way, the desired accuracy is achieved with an improvement in the overall complexity of the algorithm. This quantum simulation method is applicable to a wide range of Hamiltonians of interest, including to quantum chemistry problems.
We propose an efficient quantum algorithm for simulating the dynamics of general Hamiltonian systems. Our technique is based on a power series expansion of the time-evolution operator in its off-diagonal terms. The expansion decouples the dynamics due to the diagonal component of the Hamiltonian from the dynamics generated by its off-diagonal part, which we encode using the linear combination of unitaries technique. Our method has an optimal dependence on the desired precision and, as we illustrate, generally requires considerably fewer resources than the current state-of-the-art. We provide an analysis of resource costs for several sample models.