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arXiv:2209.14787 · Physical Review A

State-dependent Trotter limits and their approximations

Daniel Klaus Burgarth, Niklas Galke, Alexander Hahn, Lauritz van Luijk

Published Apr 6, 2023• 14 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

This paper gives sufficient conditions to conclude the validity of digital simulations involving the Trotter product formula for finite discretizations of continuous operators. Essentially, it depends on the state-dependent Trotter error, for which it establishes explicit bounds that are also of independent interest.
DOI
10.1103/physreva.107.l040201

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The Trotter-Suzuki decomposition is an important tool for the simulation and control of physical systems. We provide evidence for the stability of the Trotter-Suzuki decomposition. We model the error in the decomposition and determine sufficiency conditions that guarantee the stability of this decomposition under this model. We relate these sufficiency conditions to precision limitations of computing and control in both classical and quantum cases. Furthermore we show that bounded-error Trotter-Suzuki decomposition can be achieved by a suitable choice of machine precision.
In this thesis, we present three innovations that can be used to simulate quantum dynamics on both quantum and classical computers. Our primary innovation is an efficient quantum algorithm for simulating time-dependent Hamiltonian evolution of general input states on a quantum computer. Given conditions on the smoothness of the Hamiltonian, the complexity of the algorithm is close to linear in the evolution time, and therefore is comparable to algorithms for time-independent Hamiltonians. In addition, we show how the complexity can be reduced by optimizing the time steps. The complexity of the algorithm is quantified by calls to an oracle, which yields information about the Hamiltonian. In contrast to previous work, which allowed an oracle query to yield an arbitrary number of bits or qubits, we assign a cost for each bit or qubit accessed, revealing hitherto unnoticed simulation costs. We also account for discretization errors in the time and the representation of the Hamiltonian. This work is enabled by our development of a decomposition scheme based on Lie-Trotter- Suzuki product formulae for ordered operator exponentials. We show, by counterexample, that Lie-Trotter-Suzuki approximations may be lower order than expected when applied to problems that have singularities or discontinuous derivatives of appropriate order. We address this problem by presenting a set of criteria that is sufficient for the validity of these approximations, prove convergence and provide upper bounds for the approximation error. We also provide a new analysis of the evolution of quantum adiabatic systems in this thesis. Our work contains the tightest upper bounds that are currently known, and the first tight lower bounds, for the error in the adiabatic approximation applied to fixed Hamiltonians in the limit of slow evolution. We use our results to address the Marzlin- Sanders counterexample Hamiltonian. Specifically, we provide sufficiency conditions for the validity of the adiabatic approximation and demonstrate that the Marzlin-Sanders counterexample fails to satisfy them. We also find a new class of time-dependent Hamiltonians that are related to the Marzlin0Sanders counterexample Hamiltonian, but nonetheless obey the adiabatic approximation for sufficiently slow evolutions.