We study how parallelism can speed up quantum simulation. A parallel quantum algorithm is proposed for simulating the dynamics of a large class of Hamiltonians with good sparse structures, called uniform-structured Hamiltonians, including various Hamiltonians of practical interest like local Hamiltonians and Pauli sums. Given the oracle access to the target sparse Hamiltonian, in both query and gate complexity, the running time of our parallel quantum simulation algorithm measured by the quantum circuit depth has a doubly (poly-)logarithmic dependence polyloglog(1/ϵ) on the simulation precision ϵ . This presents an exponential improvement over the dependence polylog(1/ϵ) of previous optimal sparse Hamiltonian simulation algorithm without parallelism. To obtain this result, we introduce a novel notion of parallel quantum walk, based on Childs' quantum walk. The target evolution unitary is approximated by a truncated Taylor series, which is obtained by combining these quantum walks in a parallel way. A lower bound Ω(loglog(1/ϵ)) is established, showing that the ϵ -dependence of the gate depth achieved in this work cannot be significantly improved.Our algorithm is applied to simulating three physical models: the Heisenberg model, the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and a quantum chemistry model in second quantization. By explicitly calculating the gate complexity for implementing the oracles, we show that on all these models, the total gate depth of our algorithm has a polyloglog(1/ϵ) dependence in the parallel setting.
We study how parallelism can speed up quantum simulation. A parallel quantum algorithm is proposed for simulating the dynamics of a large class of Hamiltonians with good sparse structures, called uniform-structured Hamiltonians, including various Hamiltonians of practical interest like local Hamiltonians and Pauli sums. Given the oracle access to the target sparse Hamiltonian, in both query and gate complexity, the running time of our parallel quantum simulation algorithm measured by the quantum circuit depth has a doubly (poly-)logarithmic dependence polyloglog(1/ϵ) on the simulation precision ϵ . This presents an exponential improvement over the dependence polylog(1/ϵ) of previous optimal sparse Hamiltonian simulation algorithm without parallelism. To obtain this result, we introduce a novel notion of parallel quantum walk, based on Childs' quantum walk. The target evolution unitary is approximated by a truncated Taylor series, which is obtained by combining these quantum walks in a parallel way. A lower bound Ω(loglog(1/ϵ)) is established, showing that the ϵ -dependence of the gate depth achieved in this work cannot be significantly improved.Our algorithm is applied to simulating three physical models: the Heisenberg model, the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and a quantum chemistry model in second quantization. By explicitly calculating the gate complexity for implementing the oracles, we show that on all these models, the total gate depth of our algorithm has a polyloglog(1/ϵ) dependence in the parallel setting.
Hamiltonian simulation is one of the most important problems in the field of quantum computing. There have been extended efforts on designing algorithms for faster simulation, and the evolution time T for the simulation greatly affect algorithm runtime as expected. While there are some specific types of Hamiltonians that can be fast-forwarded, i.e., simulated within time o(T), for some large classes of Hamiltonians (e.g., all local/sparse Hamiltonians), existing simulation algorithms require running time at least linear in the evolution time T. On the other hand, while there exist lower bounds of Ω(T) circuit size for some large classes of Hamiltonian, these lower bounds do not rule out the possibilities of Hamiltonian simulation with large but "low-depth" circuits by running things in parallel. As a result, physical systems with system size scaling with T can potentially do a fast-forwarding simulation. Therefore, it is intriguing whether we can achieve fast Hamiltonian simulation with the power of parallelism. In this work, we give a negative result for the above open problem in various settings. In the oracle model, we prove that there are time-independent sparse Hamiltonians that cannot be simulated via an oracle circuit of depth o(T). In the plain model, relying on the random oracle heuristic, we show that there exist time-independent local Hamiltonians and time-dependent geometrically local Hamiltonians on n qubits that cannot be simulated via an oracle circuit of depth o(T/n^c), where the Hamiltonians act on n qubits, and c is a constant. Lastly, we generalize the above results and show that any simulators that are geometrically local Hamiltonians cannot do the simulation much faster than parallel quantum algorithms.
Hamiltonian simulation is one of the most important problems in the field of quantum computing. There have been extended efforts on designing algorithms for faster simulation, and the evolution time T for the simulation turns out to largely affect algorithm runtime. While there are some specific types of Hamiltonians that can be fast-forwarded, i.e., simulated within time o(T), for large enough classes of Hamiltonians (e.g., all local/sparse Hamiltonians), existing simulation algorithms require running time at least linear in the evolution time T. On the other hand, while there exist lower bounds of Ω(T) circuit size for some large classes of Hamiltonian, these lower bounds do not rule out the possibilities of Hamiltonian simulation with large but "low-depth" circuits by running things in parallel. Therefore, it is intriguing whether we can achieve fast Hamiltonian simulation with the power of parallelism. In this work, we give a negative result for the above open problem, showing that sparse Hamiltonians and (geometrically) local Hamiltonians cannot be parallelly fast-forwarded. In the oracle model, we prove that there are time-independent sparse Hamiltonians that cannot be simulated via an oracle circuit of depth o(T). In the plain model, relying on the random oracle heuristic, we show that there exist time-independent local Hamiltonians and time-dependent geometrically local Hamiltonians that cannot be simulated via an oracle circuit of depth o(T/nc), where the Hamiltonians act on n-qubits, and c is a constant.
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, N is the dimension of the system, and ϵ 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.
The problem considered in this thesis is the following: We are given a Hamiltonian H and time t, and our goal is to approximately implement the unitary operator e^{-iHt} with an efficient quantum algorithm. We present an efficient algorithm for simulating sparse Hamiltonians. In terms of the maximum degree d and dimension N of the space on which the Hamiltonian acts, this algorithm uses (d^2(d+log^* N)||Ht||)^{1+o(1)} queries. This improves the complexity of the sparse Hamiltonian simulation algorithm of Berry, Ahokas, Cleve, and Sanders, which scales like (d^4(log^* N)||Ht||)^{1+o(1)}. In terms of the parameter t, these algorithms are essentially optimal due to a no--fast-forwarding theorem. \n \nIn the second part of this thesis, we consider non-sparse Hamiltonians and show significant limitations on their simulation. We generalize the no--fast-forwarding theorem to dense Hamiltonians, and rule out generic simulations taking time o(||Ht||), even though ||H|| is not a unique measure of the size of a dense Hamiltonian H. We also present a stronger limitation ruling out the possibility of generic simulations taking time poly(||Ht||,log N), showing that known simulations based on discrete-time quantum walks cannot be dramatically improved in general. We also show some positive results about simulating structured Hamiltonians efficiently.
In quantum chemistry, the "electronic structure problem" refers to the process of numerically solving Schrodinger's equation for a given molecular system. These calculations rank among the most CPU-intensive computations that are performed nowadays, yet they are also crucial to the design of new drugs and materials. The idea behind quantum simulation of quantum chemistry is that a quantum computer could perform such calculations in a manner that is exponentially more efficient than what a classical computer could accomplish. In fact, quantum simulation is quite possibly the application most naturally suited to a quantum computer. In this work we introduce novel algorithms for the simulation of quantum chemistry, algorithms that are exponentially more precise than previous algorithms in the literature. Previous algorithms are based on the Trotter-Suzuki decomposition and scale like the inverse of the desired precision, while our algorithms represent the first practical application of the recently developed truncated Taylor series approach, and they achieve scaling that is logarithmic in the inverse of the precision. We explore algorithms for both second-quantized and first-quantized encodings of the chemistry Hamiltonian, where the second-quantized encoding requires mathcalO(N) qubits for an N spin-orbital system, and the highly compressed first-quantized encoding requires mathcalO(eta) qubits, where eta<<N is the number of electrons in the system. We first introduce a second-quantized algorithm that uses pre-computed molecular integrals, resulting in a gate count that scales like widetildecalO(N8t). Next we introduce algorithms that compute molecular integrals on the fly by carefully discretizing these integrals. Indeed, figuring out how to evaluate the integrals in an efficient manner is one of the main challenges of applying the truncated Taylor series approach to the chemistry problem: the complexity of a general quantum algorithm is traditionally formulated in terms of the number of queries made to an oracle whose assumption we just assume, but in this case, we actually construct the oracle for our specific problem. The evaluation of the oracle itself requires evaluating molecular integrals, which adds additional complexity to an algorithm. We find that the gate count of the second-quantized on-the-fly algorithm scales like widetildecalO(N5t). We also find that the first-quantized on-the-fly algorithm, which uses the configuration interaction (CI) matrix representation of the Hamiltonian, requires at most widetildecalO(eta2N3t) gates. In general, the discovery of exponentially more precise algorithms will allow for the simulation of larger molecular systems than was previously possible under Trotter-based methods. In addition, the results here can be generalized to the simulation of other fermionic systems beyond the electronic structure problem.
We provide a quantum algorithm for simulating the dynamics of sparse Hamiltonians with complexity sublogarithmic in the inverse error, an exponential improvement over previous methods. Specifically, we show that a d-sparse Hamiltonian H on n qubits can be simulated for time t with precision ε using O(τlog(τ/ε)/log log(τ/ε)) queries and O(τnlog2(τ/ε)/log log(τ/ε)) additional 2-qubit gates, where τ=d2||H||maxt. Unlike previous approaches based on product formulas, the query complexity is independent of the number of qubits acted on, and for time-varying Hamiltonians, the gate complexity is logarithmic in the norm of the derivative of the Hamiltonian. Our algorithm is based on a significantly improved simulation of the continuous- and fractional-query models using discrete quantum queries, showing that the former models are not much more powerful than the discrete model even for very small error. We also significantly simplify the analysis of this conversion, avoiding the need for a complex fault correction procedure. Our simplification relies on a new form of "oblivious amplitude amplification" that can be applied even though the reflection about the input state is unavailable. Finally, we prove new lower bounds showing that our algorithms are optimal as a function of the error.