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arXiv:2109.11859 · International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (LATTICE)

Quantum State Preparation for the Schwinger Model

Giovanni Pederiva, Alexei Bazavov, Brandon Henke, Leon Hostetler, Dean Lee, Huey-Wen Lin, Andrea Shindler

Published May 16, 2022• 7 citations
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Abstract

It is not possible, using standard lattice techniques in Euclidean space, to calculate the complete fermionic spectrum of a quantum field theory. Algorithms running on quantum computers have the potential to access the theory with real-time evolution, enabling a direct computation. As a testing ground we consider the 1+1-dimensional Schwinger model with the presence of a $\theta$ term using a staggered fermions discretization. We study the convergence properties of two different algorithms -adiabatic evolution and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm- with an emphasis on their cost in terms of CNOT gates. This is crucial to understand the feasibility of these algorithms, because calculations on near-term quantum devices depend on their rapid convergence. We also propose a blocked algorithm that has the first indications of a better scaling behavior with the dimensionality of the problem.

DOI
10.22323/1.396.0047

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It is not possible, using standard lattice techniques in Euclidean space, to calculate the complete fermionic spectrum of a quantum field theory. Algorithms running on quantum computers have the potential to access the theory with real-time evolution, enabling a direct computation. As a testing ground we consider the 1+1-dimensional Schwinger model with the presence of a θ\thetaθ term using a staggered fermions discretization. We study the convergence properties of two different algorithms -adiabatic evolution and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm- with an emphasis on their cost in terms of CNOT gates. This is crucial to understand the feasibility of these algorithms, because calculations on near-term quantum devices depend on their rapid convergence. We also propose a blocked algorithm that has the first indications of a better scaling behavior with the dimensionality of the problem.
We present a comparison of different quantum state preparation algorithms and their overall efficiency for the Schwinger model with a theta term. While adiabatic state preparation is proved to be effective, in practice it leads to large gate counts to prepare the ground state. The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) provides excellent results while keeping the counts small by design, at the cost of an expensive classical minimization process. We introduce a “blocked” modification of the Schwinger Hamiltonian to be used in the QAOA that further decreases the length of the algorithms as the size of the problem is increased. The rodeo algorithm (RA) provides a powerful tool to efficiently prepare any eigenstate of the Hamiltonian, as long as its overlap with the initial guess is large enough. We obtain the best results when combining the blocked QAOA ansatz and the RA, as this provides an excellent initial state with a relatively short algorithm without the need to perform any classical steps for large problem sizes.
We designed a protocol for digital quantum computation of a gauge theory with a topological term in Minkowski spacetime, which is practically inaccessible by standard lattice Monte Carlo simulations. We focus on 1+11+11+1 dimensional quantum electrodynamics with the $\ensuremath{\theta}$ term known as the Schwinger model and test our protocol for this on an IBM simulator. We construct the true vacuum state of a lattice Schwinger model using adiabatic state preparation which, in turn, allows us to compute an expectation value of the fermion mass operator with respect to the vacuum. Upon taking a continuum limit we find that our result in the massless case agrees with the known exact result. In the massive case, we find an agreement with mass perturbation theory in the small-mass regime and deviations in the large-mass regime. We estimate computational costs required to take a reasonable continuum limit. Our results imply that digital quantum simulation appears a promising tool to explore nonperturbative aspects of gauge theories with real time and topological terms.
We perform a digital quantum simulation of a gauge theory with a topological term in Minkowski spacetime, which is practically inaccessible by standard lattice Monte Carlo simulations. We focus on 1+11+11+1 dimensional quantum electrodynamics with the θ\thetaθ-term known as the Schwinger model. We construct the true vacuum state of a lattice Schwinger model using adiabatic state preparation which, in turn, allows us to compute an expectation value of the fermion mass operator with respect to the vacuum. Upon taking a continuum limit we find that our result in massless case agrees with the known exact result. In massive case, we find an agreement with mass perturbation theory in small mass regime and deviations in large mass regime. We estimate computational costs required to take a reasonable continuum limit. Our results imply that digital quantum simulation is already useful tool to explore non-perturbative aspects of gauge theories with real time and topological terms.
We argue the feasibility of studying the phase structure of a quantum physical system on quantum devices via adiabatic preparation of states. We introduce a method and successfully test it in application to the Schwinger model in the presence of a topological $\ensuremath{\theta}$ term. We explore the first-order-phase-transition and the no-transition regions of the corresponding phase diagram. The core idea of the method is to separately evolve the ground and the first excited states with a time-dependent Hamiltonian, the time dependence of which interpolates between different values of $\ensuremath{\theta}$. Despite our approach being a direct application of the adiabatic theorem, in some cases we are able to demonstrate its advantages in comparison to a different method from the literature that also employs adiabatic state preparation.
We discuss a method to efficiently compute energy spectra in quantum field theories by digital quantum simulation. We utilize a quantum algorithm called coherent imaging spectroscopy which quenches the ground state with a perturbation oscillating periodically in time for various frequencies and then reads off excited energy levels from values of frequencies having loss of the vacuum-to-vacuum probability by the quench. We demonstrate this method in the Schwinger model which is the (1+1)-dimensional quantum electrodynamics with a topological term. In particular, the ground state of the Schwinger model on lattice is prepared by adiabatic state preparation and then we apply various types of quenches to the approximate ground state via Suzuki-Trotter time evolution. We benchmark the types of quenches and argue their (dis)advantages especially in the context of studying quantum field theories. We also estimate the computational complexity to obtain physically reasonable results which likely implies efficiency of the method in the early fault-tolerant quantum computer era
Simulating the real-time dynamics of gauge theories represents a paradigmatic use case to test the hardware capabilities of a quantum computer, since it can involve non-trivial input states' preparation, discretized time evolution, long-distance entanglement, and measurement in a noisy environment. We implemented an algorithm to simulate the real-time dynamics of a few-qubit system that approximates the Schwinger model in the framework of lattice gauge theories, with specific attention to the occurrence of a dynamical quantum phase transition. Limitations in the simulation capabilities on IBM Quantum were imposed by noise affecting the application of single-qubit and two-qubit gates, which combine in the decomposition of Trotter evolution. The experimental results collected in quantum algorithm runs on IBM Quantum were compared with noise models to characterize the performance in the absence of error mitigation.