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arXiv:2107.07238 · Physical Review A

Exploiting fermion number in factorized decompositions of the electronic structure Hamiltonian

Sam McArdle, Earl T. Campbell, Yuan Su

Published Jan 3, 2022• 17 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Achieving an accurate description of fermionic systems typically requires considerably many more orbitals than fermions. Previous resource analyses of quantum chemistry simulation often failed to exploit this low fermionic number information in the implementation of Trotter-based approaches and overestimated the quantum-computer runtime as a result. They also depended on numerical procedures that are computationally too expensive to scale up to large systems of practical interest. Here we propose techniques that solve both problems by using various factorized decompositions of the electronic structure Hamiltonian. We showcase our techniques for the uniform electron gas, finding substantial (over $100\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}$) improvements in Trotter error for low-filling fraction and pushing to much higher numbers of orbitals than is possible with existing methods. Finally, we calculate the $T$-count to perform phase estimation on Jellium. In the low-filling regime, we observe improvements in gate complexity of over $10\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}$ compared to the best Trotter-based approach reported to date. We also report gate counts competitive with qubitization-based approaches for Wigner-Seitz values of physical interest.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.105.012403

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Achieving an accurate description of fermionic systems typically requires considerably many more orbitals than fermions. Previous resource analyses of quantum chemistry simulation often failed to exploit this low fermionic number information in the implementation of Trotter-based approaches and overestimated the quantum-computer runtime as a result. They also depended on numerical procedures that are computationally too expensive to scale up to large systems of practical interest. Here we propose techniques that solve both problems by using various factorized decompositions of the electronic structure Hamiltonian. We showcase our techniques for the uniform electron gas, finding substantial (over 100\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi100\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}100\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi) improvements in Trotter error for low-filling fraction and pushing to much higher numbers of orbitals than is possible with existing methods. Finally, we calculate the TTT-count to perform phase estimation on Jellium. In the low-filling regime, we observe improvements in gate complexity of over 10\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi10\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}10\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi compared to the best Trotter-based approach reported to date. We also report gate counts competitive with qubitization-based approaches for Wigner-Seitz values of physical interest.
With quantum computers on the horizon, it is essential to understand what problems they can be used to solve. One potential application is simulating quantum systems, in particular, systems with many interacting electrons. However, there is a disparity between the computational resources required to study these problems and the capabilities of modern experimental quantum devices. In this thesis, we make progress toward closing this gap by reducing the cost of quantum simulation of quantum chemistry on a number of fronts. In the first half, we develop three improved quantum simulation algorithms by approximating time evolution under the Hamiltonian using a truncated Taylor series rather than the Trotter-Suzuki decomposition. We do this first for the molecular electronic structure Hamiltonian in two representations, obtaining asymptotic improvements in terms of both the number of orbitals and the required precision. We also apply the truncated Taylor series paradigm to quantum simulation in real space, where we consider simulation of general wave functions discretized on a uniform grid. In the second half, by working with Hamiltonians tailored specifically to quantum algorithms, we demonstrate that Trotter steps of the electronic structure Hamiltonian can be simulated in exactly N depth and with only linear connectivity, where N is the number of spin-orbitals. This resolves the problem of non-locality in fermion-to-qubit mappings, and has wide-ranging applications for variational and phase estimation-based quantum simulation of quantum chemistry. We further study this algorithm on an error-corrected quantum computer using the surface code. Benchmarking it alongside other product formula approaches, we show that quantum simulation of scientifically important instances of the electronic structure problem that are classically intractable can be performed with only a few hundred thousand physical qubits and fewer than one billion costly fault-tolerant gates. Finally, we study the effect of using randomized Hamiltonians in iterative phase estimation, and how this allows us to reduce the costs of simulation as well as to exploit knowledge of the ground state in how we design our simulation algorithm.
Solving the electronic structure problem via unitary evolution of the electronic Hamiltonian is one of the promising applications of digital quantum computers. One of the practical strategies to implement the unitary evolution is via Trotterization, where a sequence of short-time evolutions of fast-forwardable (i.e. efficiently diagonalizable) Hamiltonian fragments is used. Given multiple choices of possible Hamiltonian decompositions to fast-forwardable fragments, the accuracy of the Hamiltonian evolution depends on the choice of the fragments. We assess efficiency of multiple Hamiltonian partitioning techniques using fermionic and qubit algebras for the Trotterization. Use of symmetries of the electronic Hamiltonian and its fragments significantly reduces the Trotter error. This reduction makes fermionic-based partitioning Trotter errors lower compared to those in qubit-based techniques. However, from the simulation-cost standpoint, fermionic methods tend to introduce quantum circuits with a greater number of T-gates at each Trotter step and thus are more computationally expensive compared to their qubit counterparts.
Abstract The quantum simulation of quantum chemistry is a promising application of quantum computers. However, for N molecular orbitals, the O(N4){\mathcal{O}}({N}^{4})O(N4) O ( N 4 ) gate complexity of performing Hamiltonian and unitary Coupled Cluster Trotter steps makes simulation based on such primitives challenging. We substantially reduce the gate complexity of such primitives through a two-step low-rank factorization of the Hamiltonian and cluster operator, accompanied by truncation of small terms. Using truncations that incur errors below chemical accuracy allow one to perform Trotter steps of the arbitrary basis electronic structure Hamiltonian with O(N3){\mathcal{O}}({N}^{3})O(N3) O ( N 3 ) gate complexity in small simulations, which reduces to O(N2){\mathcal{O}}({N}^{2})O(N2) O ( N 2 ) gate complexity in the asymptotic regime; and unitary Coupled Cluster Trotter steps with O(N3){\mathcal{O}}({N}^{3})O(N3) O ( N 3 ) gate complexity as a function of increasing basis size for a given molecule. In the case of the Hamiltonian Trotter step, these circuits have O(N2){\mathcal{O}}({N}^{2})O(N2) O ( N 2 ) depth on a linearly connected array, an improvement over the O(N3){\mathcal{O}}({N}^{3})O(N3) O ( N 3 ) scaling assuming no truncation. As a practical example, we show that a chemically accurate Hamiltonian Trotter step for a 50 qubit molecular simulation can be carried out in the molecular orbital basis with as few as 4000 layers of parallel nearest-neighbor two-qubit gates, consisting of fewer than 10 5 non-Clifford rotations. We also apply our algorithm to iron–sulfur clusters relevant for elucidating the mode of action of metalloenzymes.
We present several improvements to the standard Trotter-Suzuki based algorithms used in the simulation of quantum chemistry on a quantum computer. First, we modify how Jordan-Wigner transformations are implemented to reduce their cost from linear or logarithmic in the number of orbitals to a constant. Our modification does not require additional ancilla qubits. Then, we demonstrate how many operations can be parallelized, leading to a further linear decrease in the parallel depth of the circuit, at the cost of a small constant factor increase in number of qubits required. Thirdly, we modify the term order in the Trotter-Suzuki decomposition, significantly reducing the error at given Trotter-Suzuki timestep. A final improvement modifies the Hamiltonian to reduce errors introduced by the non-zero Trotter-Suzuki timestep. All of these techniques are validated using numerical simulation and detailed gate counts are given for realistic molecules.
Discretizing electronic degrees of freedom into atomic orbitals is the default choice to accurately model electrons in molecules in a compact and flexible way. We consider the task of simulating such electronic structure models on a quantum computer for NNN orbitals, keeping the number of orbitals per atom constant. Atomic orbitals give rise to Hamiltonians with potentially up to O(N4)\mathcal{O}(N^4)O(N4) terms and little structure, which made it challenging to match the complexity of methods based on plane waves and real-space grids. In this work, we show that a Trotter step for atomic orbitals can be implemented in depth O(polylog(N))\mathcal{O}(\mathrm{polylog}(N))O(polylog(N)) without ancillas by combining a rigorous treatment of orbital localization, a hierarchical Hamiltonian decomposition based on the Fast Multipole Method, and shallow quantum Fourier arithmetic circuits. By bounding the Trotter error, we obtain sublinear simulation depth, and our total gate count N5/3+o(1)N^{5/3 + o(1)}N5/3+o(1) matches the best scaling known for any basis.
We present several improvements to the standard Trotter-Suzuki based algorithms used in the simulation of quantum chemistry on a quantum computer. First, we modify how Jordan-Wigner transformations are implemented to reduce their cost from linear or logarithmic in the number of orbitals to a constant. Our modification does not require additional ancilla qubits. Then, we demonstrate how many operations can be parallelized, leading to a further linear decrease in the parallel depth of the circuit, at the cost of a small constant factor increase in number of qubits required. Thirdly, we modify the term order in the Trotter-Suzuki decomposition, significantly reducing the error at given Trotter-Suzuki timestep. A final improvement modifies the Hamiltonian to reduce errors introduced by the non-zero Trotter-Suzuki timestep. All of these techniques are validated using numerical simulation and detailed gate counts are given for realistic molecules.