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arXiv:2003.06886 · Nature Communications

Hamiltonian simulation algorithms for near-term quantum hardware

Laura Clinton, Johannes Bausch, Toby S. Cubitt

Published Aug 17, 2021• 80 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The quantum circuit model is the de-facto way of designing quantum algorithms. Yet any level of abstraction away from the underlying hardware incurs overhead. In this work, we develop quantum algorithms for Hamiltonian simulation "one level below" the circuit model, exploiting the underlying control over qubit interactions available in most quantum hardware and deriving analytic circuit identities for synthesising multi-qubit evolutions from two-qubit interactions. We then analyse the impact of these techniques under the standard error model where errors occur per gate, and an error model with a constant error rate per unit time. To quantify the benefits of this approach, we apply it to time-dynamics simulation of the 2D spin Fermi-Hubbard model. Combined with new error bounds for Trotter product formulas tailored to the non-asymptotic regime and an analysis of error propagation, we find that e.g. for a 5 × 5 Fermi-Hubbard lattice we reduce the circuit depth from 1, 243, 586 using the best previous fermion encoding and error bounds in the literature, to 3, 209 in the per-gate error model, or the circuit-depth-equivalent to 259 in the per-time error model. This brings Hamiltonian simulation, previously beyond reach of current hardware for non-trivial examples, significantly closer to being feasible in the NISQ era.

DOI
10.1038/s41467-021-25196-0

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•Jan 1, 2020•0 citations
The quantum circuit model is the de-facto way of designing quantum algorithms. Yet any level of abstraction away from the underlying hardware incurs overhead. In this work, we develop quantum algorithms for Hamiltonian simulation "one level below" the circuit model, exploiting the underlying control over qubit interactions available in most quantum hardware and deriving analytic circuit identities for synthesising multi-qubit evolutions from two-qubit interactions. We then analyse the impact of these techniques under the standard error model where errors occur per gate, and an error model with a constant error rate per unit time. To quantify the benefits of this approach, we apply it to time-dynamics simulation of the 2D spin Fermi-Hubbard model. Combined with new error bounds for Trotter product formulas tailored to the non-asymptotic regime and an analysis of error propagation, we find that e.g. for a 5 × 5 Fermi-Hubbard lattice we reduce the circuit depth from 1, 243, 586 using the best previous fermion encoding and error bounds in the literature, to 3, 209 in the per-gate error model, or the circuit-depth-equivalent to 259 in the per-time error model. This brings Hamiltonian simulation, previously beyond reach of current hardware for non-trivial examples, significantly closer to being feasible in the NISQ era.
Various Hamiltonian simulation algorithms have been proposed to efficiently study the dynamics of quantum systems on a quantum computer. The existing algorithms generally approximate the time evolution operators, which may need a deep quantum circuit that is beyond the capability of near-term noisy quantum devices. Here, focusing on the time evolution of a fixed input quantum state, we propose an adaptive approach to construct a low-depth time evolution circuit. By introducing a measurable quantifier that characterizes the simulation error, we use an adaptive strategy to learn the shallow quantum circuit that minimizes that error. We numerically test the adaptive method with electronic Hamiltonians of the H_{2}O and H_{4} molecules, and the transverse field Ising model with random coefficients. Compared to the first-order Suzuki-Trotter product formula, our method can significantly reduce the circuit depth (specifically the number of two-qubit gates) by around two orders while maintaining the simulation accuracy. We show applications of the method in simulating many-body dynamics and solving energy spectra with the quantum Krylov algorithm. Our work sheds light on practical Hamiltonian simulation with noisy-intermediate-scale-quantum devices.
Understanding the dynamics of interacting quantum systems is a central goal of quantum simulation. For geometrically local Hamiltonians, locality suggests that digital simulation should retain much of the parallelism of the underlying dynamics. For a target accuracy εεε, we construct a nearest-neighbor quantum circuit that simulates the dynamics of an nnn-qubit, time-independent, finite-range Hamiltonian with normalized local interaction strength on a fixed-dimensional lattice for time T≥1T\ge1T≥1, with circuit depth O(Tlog⁡(nT/ε))O(T\log(nT/ε))O(Tlog(nT/ε)) and gate count O(nTlog⁡(nT/ε))O(nT\log(nT/ε))O(nTlog(nT/ε)). This reduces the polylogarithmic overhead of Haah, Hastings, Kothari, and Low to a single logarithm. On logarithmic-scale blocks from the Lieb--Robinson decomposition, a shallow but highly accurate implementation is essential for reducing the circuit depth. Our key observation is that spatial localization also controls the cost of high precision. In each block, the error of a constant-order product formula is compensated for by a correction, yielding exponential accuracy. The correction can be implemented with depth proportional to the block diameter, introducing no additional asymptotic depth scale beyond that required by spatial localization. Furthermore, we prove an unconditional circuit-depth lower bound for uniform XXZ Hamiltonians: at fixed evolution time TTT in the stated regime and sufficiently small fixed error εεε, any nearest-neighbor quantum circuit simulating these dynamics requires depth Ω(log⁡n/log⁡log⁡n)Ω(\log n/\log\log n)Ω(logn/loglogn). This matches our O(log⁡n)O(\log n)O(logn) upper bound up to a doubly logarithmic factor, establishing near-optimal circuit depth for lattice Hamiltonian simulation in this regime. Together, these results clarify the role of locality and precision in determining the circuit complexity of quantum dynamics and suggest broader principles for spatially constrained quantum computation.
Abstract Determining the ground and excited state properties of materials is considered one of the most promising applications of quantum computers. On near-term hardware, the limiting constraint on such simulations is the requisite circuit depths and qubit numbers, which currently lie well beyond near-term capabilities. Here we develop a quantum algorithm which reduces the estimated cost of material simulations. For example, we obtain a circuit depth improvement by up to 6 orders of magnitude for a Trotter layer of time-dynamics simulation in the transition-metal oxide SrVO3compared with the best previous quantum algorithms. We achieve this by introducing a collection of connected techniques, including highly localised and physically compact representations of materials Hamiltonians in the Wannier basis, a hybrid fermion-to-qubit mapping, and an efficient circuit compiler. Combined together, these methods leverage locality of materials Hamiltonians and result in a design that generates quantum circuits with depth independent of the system’s size. Although the requisite resources for the quantum simulation of materials are still beyond current hardware, our results show that realistic simulation of specific properties may be feasible without necessarily requiring fully scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computers, providing quantum algorithm design incorporates deeper understanding of the target materials and applications.
Simulating real-time dynamics under a Hamiltonian is a central goal of quantum information science. While numerous Hamiltonian-simulation quantum algorithms have been proposed, the effects of physical noise have rarely been incorporated into their performance analysis, despite the non-negligible noise levels of quantum devices. We present an end-to-end complexity analysis of noisy Hamiltonian simulation combined with quantum error mitigation (QEM) to answer how many circuit runs are required to reach a given target accuracy. Because the QEM sampling overhead grows exponentially with the circuit depth while the algorithmic error decreases with it, the circuit depth becomes an optimization variable, and we derive an analytic depth-selection rule for two algorithm families. For the order-kkk Suzuki--Trotter formula, the optimized cost exhibits a critical error εcε_cεc​, below which the required number of circuit runs grows exponentially. QEM improves the noise dependence of εcε_cεc​ from sublinear to kkkth-power scaling, an exponent improvement by a factor of k+1k+1k+1. For randomized-LCU-based simulation, optimizing the repetition number yields a square-root improvement in the simulation-time dependence of the sampling-overhead exponent over the standard parameter choice. We further quantify the noise-characterization cost required for error mitigation via gate set tomography and the recently proposed space-time noise inversion method, showing that the latter can significantly reduce this cost.
Abstract Dynamic simulation of materials is a promising application for near-term quantum computers. Current algorithms for Hamiltonian simulation, however, produce circuits that grow in depth with increasing simulation time, limiting feasible simulations to short-time dynamics. Here, we present a method for generating circuits that are constant in depth with increasing simulation time for a specific subset of one-dimensional (1D) materials Hamiltonians, thereby enabling simulations out to arbitrarily long times. Furthermore, by removing the effective limit on the number of feasibly simulatable time-steps, the constant-depth circuits enable Trotter error to be made negligibly small by allowing simulations to be broken into arbitrarily many time-steps. For an N -spin system, the constant-depth circuit contains only O(N2)\mathcal {O}(N^{2})O(N2) O ( N 2 ) CNOT gates. Such compact circuits enable us to successfully execute long-time dynamic simulation of ubiquitous models, such as the transverse field Ising and XY models, on current quantum hardware for systems of up to 5 qubits without the need for complex error mitigation techniques. Aside from enabling long-time dynamic simulations with minimal Trotter error for a specific subset of 1D Hamiltonians, our constant-depth circuits can advance materials simulations on quantum computers more broadly in a number of indirect ways.
Simulating the Hamiltonian dynamics of quantum systems is one of the most promising applications of digital quantum computers. In this dissertation, we develop an understanding of quantum simulation algorithms concerning their design, analysis, implementation, and application. We implement three leading simulation algorithms, employing diverse techniques to tighten their error analyses and optimize circuit implementations. We produce concrete resource estimates for simulating a Heisenberg spin system, a problem arising in condensed matter physics that is otherwise difficult to solve on a classical computer. The resulting circuits are orders of magnitude smaller than those for the simplest classically-infeasible instances of factoring and quantum chemistry, suggesting the simulation of spin systems as a promising candidate for an early demonstration of practical quantum computation. We design new simulation algorithms by using classical randomness. We show that by simply randomizing how the terms in the Hamiltonian are ordered, one can prove stronger bounds for product formulas and thereby give more efficient quantum simulations. We also develop a classical sampler for time-dependent Hamiltonians, using which we give a simulation algorithm that substantially improves over previous approaches when the Hamiltonian varies significantly with time. We propose a general theory to analyzing product formulas, an approach to quantum simulation widely used in experimental demonstrations but whose error scaling was poorly understood. Our approach directly exploits the commutativity of Hamiltonian, overcoming the limitations of prior error analyses. We prove new speedups of product formulas for simulating many quantum systems, including simulations of nearest-neighbor lattice systems, second-quantized plane-wave electronic structure, kkk-local Hamiltonians, rapidly decaying power-law interactions, and clustered Hamiltonians, nearly matching or even outperforming the best previous results in quantum simulation. We accompany our analysis with numerical calculation, which suggests that the bounds also have nearly tight constant prefactors. We identify applications of quantum simulation to designing other quantum algorithms and improving quantum Monte Carlo methods. We develop an algorithmic framework ``quantum singular value transformation'' using techniques from quantum simulation and apply it to implement principal component regression. We also apply our new analysis of product formulas and obtain improved quantum Monte Carlo simulations of the transverse field Ising model and quantum ferromagnets.