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arXiv:1903.01654 · Physical Review A

High-fidelity Trotter formulas for digital quantum simulation

Yi-Xiang Liu, Jordan Hines, Zhi Li, Ashok Ajoy, Paola Cappellaro

Published Jul 14, 2020• 9 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum simulation promises to address many challenges in fields ranging from quantum chemistry to material science and high-energy physics, and could be implemented in noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. A challenge in building good digital quantum simulators is the fidelity of the engineered dynamics given a finite set of elementary operations. Here we present a framework for optimizing the order of operations based on a geometric picture, thus abstracting from the operation details and achieving computational efficiency. Based on this geometric framework, we provide two alternative second-order Trotter expansions: one with optimal fidelity at a short timescale, and the second robust at a long timescale. Thanks to the improved fidelity at different timescales, the two expansions we introduce can form the basis for experimental-constrained digital quantum simulation.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.102.010601

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Quantum simulation promises to address many challenges in fields ranging from quantum chemistry to material science and high-energy physics, and could be implemented in noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. A challenge in building good digital quantum simulators is the fidelity of the engineered dynamics given a finite set of elementary operations. Here we present a framework for optimizing the order of operations based on a geometric picture, thus abstracting from the operation details and achieving computational efficiency. Based on this geometric framework, we provide two alternative second-order Trotter expansions: one with optimal fidelity at a short timescale, and the second robust at a long timescale. Thanks to the improved fidelity at different timescales, the two expansions we introduce can form the basis for experimental-constrained digital quantum simulation.
The goal of digital quantum simulation is to approximate the dynamics of a given target Hamiltonian via a sequence of quantum gates, a procedure known as Trotterization.The quality of this approximation can be controlled by the so-called Trotter step that governs the number of required quantum gates per unit simulation time.The stroboscopic dynamics generated by Trotterization is effectively described by a time-independent Hamiltonian, referred to as the Floquet Hamiltonian.In this work, we propose Floquet Hamiltonian learning to reconstruct the experimentally realized Floquet Hamiltonian order by order in the Trotter step.This procedure is efficient, i.e., it requires a number of measurements that scales polynomially in the system size, and can be readily implemented in state-of-the-art experiments.With numerical examples, we propose several applications of our method in the context of verification of quantum devices: from the characterization of the distinct sources of errors in digital quantum simulators to determining the optimal operating regime of the device.We show that our protocol provides the basis for feedback-loop design and calibration of new types of quantum gates.Furthermore, it can be extended to the case of nonunitary dynamics and used to learn Floquet Liouvillians, thereby offering a way of characterizing the dissipative processes present in noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.
A higher-order Suzuki-Trotter decomposition or Trotterization can be exploited to mitigate the Trotter error in digital quantum simulation. This work revisits the second-order symmetric Trotterization in terms of the Trotter error, where quantum many-body spin dynamics of the transverse-field Ising model is simulated. While the work presents a pedagogical way to exploit a real quantum computer, the effectiveness of the symmetric Trotterization is evaluated in a prototype superconducting quantum device on IBM Quantum Experience. It turns out that the symmetric Trotterization does not provide higher accuracy than the first-order Trotterization in the testbed using the transverse-field Ising model. The result indicates that apart from the quantum errors, such as logical gate error and readout error, the use of a higher-order Trotterization should be circumspect, and the Trotter error would play an insignificant role in particular applications in an early stage of realized noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices.
We present a general framework for promoting first-order pulse sequences in quantum simulation to higher-order sequences that maintain robustness in the presence of finite pulse-width effects. Our approach maps a given first-order pulse sequence to a first-order Trotter formula, applies higher-order Trotter-formula constructions, and then compiles the resulting evolution back into physically implementable finite-width pulses via dynamically corrected gates. The resulting sequences achieve arbitrarily high-order error scaling with respect to the control cycle time of the underlying first-order sequence while maintaining robustness to finite pulse-width effects. The framework also enables the use of multi-product formulas for more efficient constructions. We apply the framework to several physically motivated quantum-simulation tasks and numerically verify the predicted error scalings.
As noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) processors increase in size and complexity, their use as general purpose quantum simulators will rely on algorithms based on the Trotter-Suzuki expansion. We run quantum simulations on a small, highly accurate quantum processor, and show how one can optimize simulation accuracy by balancing algorithmic (Trotter) errors against native errors specific to the quantum hardware at hand. We further study the interplay between native errors, Trotter errors, and the emergence of chaos as seen in measurements of a time averaged fidelity-out-of-time-ordered-correlator
Accurately simulating long-time dynamics of many-body systems is a challenge in both classical and quantum computing due to the accumulation of Trotter errors. While low-order Trotter-Suzuki decompositions are straightforward to implement, their rapidly growing error limits access to long-time observables. We present a framework for constructing efficient high-order Trotter-Suzuki schemes by identifying their structure and directly optimizing their parameters over a high-dimensional space. This method enables the discovery of new schemes with significantly improved efficiency compared to traditional constructions, such as those by Suzuki and Yoshida. Based on the theoretical efficiency and practical performance, we recommend two novel highly efficient schemes at 4th4^{\textrm{th}}4th and 6th6^{\textrm{th}}6th order. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of these decompositions on the Heisenberg model and the quantum harmonic oscillator, and find that for a fixed final time they perform better across the computational cost. Even when using large time steps, they surpass established low-order schemes like the Leapfrog. Finally, we investigate the in-practice performance of different Trotter schemes and find the decompositions with more uniform coefficients tend to feature improved error accumulation over long times. We have included this observation into our choice of recommended schemes.
Efficiently simulating many-body quantum systems with Coulomb interactions is a fundamental question in quantum physics, quantum chemistry, and quantum computing, yet it presents unique challenges: the Hamiltonian is an unbounded operator; its Hilbert space dimension grows exponentially with particle number; and the Coulomb potential is singular, long-ranged, and non-smooth, violating the regularity assumptions of many prior state-of-the-art many-body simulation analyses. In this work, we establish rigorous error bounds for Trotter formulas applied to these systems. Our first main result shows that for general initial conditions in the domain of the Hamiltonian, second-order Trotter achieves a 1/41/41/4 convergence rate with explicit polynomial dependence of the error prefactor on the particle number. The polynomial dependence on system size suggests that the algorithm remains quantumly efficient, even without introducing any regularization of the Coulomb singularity. Such a worst-case rate has been observed in prior work for the hydrogen ground state, demonstrating its physical relevance. We further establish one-step local error lower bounds of order 5/45/45/4 for both formulas, showing that the local exponent is sharp. Our second main result identifies a set of physically meaningful conditions on the initial state under which the convergence rates improve, with the full first-order and second-order rates recovered at sufficiently high angular momentum. Our theoretical findings are consistent with prior numerical observations. Our third main result establishes improved convergence rates for many-body fermionic Coulomb systems with initial data of different Sobolev regularity. In particular, even without imposing any additional regularity beyond the natural domain of the Hamiltonian, both the first- and second-order Trotter formulas converge with rate 1/21/21/2, rather than the general 1/41/41/4 rate.