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arXiv:2204.05322 · Physical Review A

Fermionic approach to variational quantum simulation of Kitaev spin models

Ammar Jahin, Andy C. Y. Li, Thomas Iadecola, Peter P. Orth, Gabriel Perdue, Alexandru Macridin, M. Sohaib Alam, Norm M. Tubman

Published Aug 29, 2022• 17 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We use the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) to simulate Kitaev spin models with and without integrability-breaking perturbations, focusing in particular on the honeycomb and square-octagon lattices. These models are well known for being exactly solvable in a certain parameter regime via a mapping to free fermions. We use classical simulations to explore a variational ansatz that takes advantage of this fermionic representation and is capable of expressing the exact ground state in the solvable limit. We also demonstrate that this ansatz can be extended beyond this limit to provide excellent accuracy when compared to other VQE approaches. In certain cases, this fermionic representation is advantageous because it reduces by a factor of two the number of qubits required to perform the simulation. We also comment on the implications of our results for simulating non-Abelian anyons on quantum computers.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.106.022434

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We use the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) to simulate Kitaev spin models with and without integrability-breaking perturbations, focusing in particular on the honeycomb and square-octagon lattices. These models are well known for being exactly solvable in a certain parameter regime via a mapping to free fermions. We use classical simulations to explore a variational ansatz that takes advantage of this fermionic representation and is capable of expressing the exact ground state in the solvable limit. We also demonstrate that this ansatz can be extended beyond this limit to provide excellent accuracy when compared to other VQE approaches. In certain cases, this fermionic representation is advantageous because it reduces by a factor of two the number of qubits required to perform the simulation. We also comment on the implications of our results for simulating non-Abelian anyons on quantum computers.
We study the simulation of the Kitaev spin model on quantum computers. In particular we focus on the models defined on the honeycomb, and square-octagon lattices. Using a fermionic language to describe these models reveals a region of the parameter space that is exactly solvable. We explore an ansatz that is capable of expressing the ground state in the exactly solvable region of the parameter space and extend it outside this region with good accuracy. Doing the calculation using fermions, while requiring the introduction of a non-local map from the fermionic Hilbert space to that of qubits, offers the potentially interesting application of realizing non-abelian anyons on quantum computers, and can also lead to a reduction in the number of qubits required by half.
Quantum spin systems may offer the first opportunities for beyond-classical quantum computations of scientific interest. While general quantum simulation algorithms likely require error-corrected qubits, there may be applications of scientific interest prior to the practical implementation of quantum error correction. The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a promising approach to finding energy eigenvalues on noisy quantum computers. Lattice models are of broad interest for use on near-term quantum hardware due to the sparsity of the number of Hamiltonian terms and the possibility of matching the lattice geometry to the hardware geometry. Here, we consider the Kitaev spin model on a hardware-native square-octagon qubit connectivity map, and examine the possibility of efficiently probing its rich phase diagram with VQE approaches. By benchmarking different choices of variational Ansatz states and classical optimizers, we illustrate the advantage of a mixed optimization approach using the Hamiltonian variational Ansatz (HVA) and the potential of probing the system's phase diagram using VQE. We further demonstrate the implementation of HVA circuits on Rigetti's Aspen-9 chip with error mitigation.
Abstract Mapping out phase diagrams of quantum systems using classical simulations can be challenging or intractable due to the computational resources required to simulate even small quantum systems far away from the thermodynamic limit. We investigate using quantum computers and the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) for this task. In contrast to the task of preparing the exact ground state using VQE, sketching phase diagrams might require less quantum resources and accuracy, because low fidelity approximations to the ground state may be enough to correctly identify different phases. We used classical numerical simulations of low-depth VQE circuits to compute order parameters for four well-studied spin and fermion models which represent a mix of 1D and 2D, and exactly-solvable and classically hard systems. We find that it is possible to predict the location of phase transitions up to reasonable accuracy using states produced by VQE even when their overlap with the true ground state is small. Further, we introduce a model-agnostic predictor of phase transitions based on the speed with which the VQE energy improves with respect to the circuit depth, and find that in some cases this is also able to predict phase transitions.
Quantum circuits have been shown to be a fertile ground for realizing long-range entangled phases of matter. While various quantum double models with non-chiral topological order have been theoretically investigated and experimentally implemented, the realization and characterization of chiral topological phases have remained less explored. Here we show that chiral topological phases in spin systems, i.e., chiral spin liquids, can be prepared in quantum circuits using the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) framework. On top of the VQE ground state, signatures of the chiral topological order are revealed using the recently proposed tangent space excitation ansatz for quantum circuits. We show that, both topological ground state degeneracy and the chiral edge mode can be faithfully captured by this approach. We demonstrate our approach using the Kitaev honeycomb model, finding excellent agreement of low-energy excitation spectrum on quantum circuits with exact solution in all topological sectors. Further applying this approach to a non-exactly solvable chiral spin liquid model on square lattice, the results suggest this approach works well even when the topological sectors are not exactly known.
Variational quantum eigensolvers (VQE) are one of the possible tasks that can be performed in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers. While one of the limitations of NISQ platforms is their restricted number of available qubits, the theory of compressable matchgate circuits can be used to circumvent this limitation for certain types of Hamiltonians. We show how VQE algorithms can be used to find the ground state of quadratic fermionic Hamiltonians, providing an expressible ansatz in a logarithmic number of qubits. In particular, for systems of nnn orbitals encoded to 2-local qubit models with nearest neighbour interactions, the ground state energy can be evaluated with O(log⁡n)O\left(\log n\right)O(logn) sets of measurements. This result is invariant of the dimensions in which the nnn sites are arranged.
Compact representations of fermionic Hamiltonians are necessary to perform calculations on quantum computers that lack error-correction. A fermionic system is typically defined within a subspace of fixed particle number and spin while unnecessary states are projected out of the Hilbert space. We provide a bijective mapping using combinatoric ranking to bijectively map fermion basis states to qubit basis states and express operators in the standard spin representation. We then evaluate compact mapping using the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) with the unitary coupled cluster singles and doubles excitations (UCCSD) ansatz in the compact representation. Compactness is beneficial when the orbital filling is well away from half, and we show at 30 spin orbital H2H_{2}H2​ calculation with only 8 qubits. We find that the gate depth needed to prepare the compact wavefunction is not much greater than the full configuration space in practice. A notable observation regards the number of calls to the optimizer needed for the compact simulation compared to the full simulation. We find that the compact representation converges faster than the full representation using the ADAM optimizer in all cases. Our analysis demonstrates the effect of compact mapping in practice.