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arXiv:2307.03858 · Quantum

Simulation-assisted learning of open quantum systems

Ke Wang, Xiantao Li

Published Jul 11, 2024• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Models for open quantum systems, which play important roles in electron transport problems and quantum computing, must take into account the interaction of the quantum system with the surrounding environment. Although such models can be derived in some special cases, in most practical situations, the exact models are unknown and have to be calibrated. This paper presents a learning method to infer parameters in Markovian open quantum systems from measurement data. One important ingredient in the method is a direct simulation technique of the quantum master equation, which is designed to preserve the completely-positive property with guaranteed accuracy. The method is particularly helpful in the situation where the time intervals between measurements are large. The approach is validated with error estimates and numerical experiments.

DOI
10.22331/q-2024-07-11-1407

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Models for open quantum systems, which play important roles in electron transport problems and quantum computing, must take into account the interaction of the quantum system with the surrounding environment. Although such models can be derived in some special cases, in most practical situations, the exact models are unknown and have to be calibrated. This paper presents a learning method to infer parameters in Markovian open quantum systems from measurement data. One important ingredient in the method is a direct simulation technique of the quantum master equation, which is designed to preserve the completely-positive property with guaranteed accuracy. The method is particularly helpful in the situation where the time intervals between measurements are large. The approach is validated with error estimates and numerical experiments.
In the study of open quantum systems, one typically obtains the decoherence dynamics by solving a master equation. The master equation is derived using knowledge of some basic properties of the system, the environment, and their interaction: One basically needs to know the operators through which the system couples to the environment and the spectral density of the environment. For a large system, it could become prohibitively difficult to even write down the appropriate master equation, let alone solve it on a classical computer. In this paper, we present a quantum algorithm for simulating the dynamics of an open quantum system. On a quantum computer, the environment can be simulated using ancilla qubits with properly chosen single-qubit frequencies and with properly designed coupling to the system qubits. The parameters used in the simulation are easily derived from the parameters of the system +++ environment Hamiltonian. The algorithm is designed to simulate Markovian dynamics, but it can also be used to simulate non-Markovian dynamics provided that this dynamics can be obtained by embedding the system of interest into a larger system that obeys Markovian dynamics. We estimate the resource requirements for the algorithm. In particular, we show that for sufficiently slow decoherence a single ancilla qubit could be sufficient to represent the entire environment, in principle.
The characterization of Hamiltonians and other components of open quantum dynamical systems plays a crucial role in quantum computing and other applications. Scientific machine learning techniques have been applied to this problem in a variety of ways, including by modeling with deep neural networks. However, the majority of mathematical models describing open quantum systems are linear, and the natural nonlinearities in learnable models have not been incorporated using physical principles. We present a data-driven model for open quantum systems that includes learnable, thermodynamically consistent terms. The trained model is interpretable, as it directly estimates the system Hamiltonian and linear components of coupling to the environment. We validate the model on synthetic two and three-level data, as well as experimental two-level data collected from a quantum device at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Accurate models of the dynamics of quantum circuits are essential for optimizing and advancing quantum devices. Since first-principles models of environmental noise and dissipation in real quantum systems are often unavailable, deriving accurate models from measured time-series data is critical. However, identifying open quantum systems poses significant challenges: powerful methods from systems engineering can perform poorly beyond weak damping (as we show) because they fail to incorporate essential constraints required for quantum evolution (e.g., positivity). Common methods that can include these constraints are typically multi-step, fitting linear models to physically grounded master equations, often resulting in non-convex functions in which local optimization algorithms get stuck in local extrema (as we show). In this work, we solve these problems by formulating quantum system identification directly from data as a polynomial optimization problem, enabling the use of recently developed global optimization methods. These methods are essentially guaranteed to reach global optima, allowing us for the first time to efficiently obtain the most accurate Markovian model for a given system. In addition to its practical importance, this allows us to take the error of these Markovian models as an alternative (operational) measure of the non-Markovianity of a system. We test our method with the spin-boson model -- a two-level system coupled to a bath of harmonic oscillators -- for which we obtain the exact evolution using matrix-product-state techniques. We show that polynomial optimization using moment/sum-of-squares approaches significantly outperforms traditional optimization algorithms, and we show that even for strong damping Lindblad-form master equations can provide accurate models of the spin-boson system.
Models of quantum systems faithfully map system parameters to observations, but the inverse problem of parameter inference from measurement data presents a fundamental challenge: computationally intractable likelihoods due to an exponentially large Hilbert space. Here, we introduce simulation-based quantum system inference, a unified, likelihood-free framework that learns parameter posteriors directly from classical simulation data. The central idea is to pair polynomial-cost classical simulators, such as Pauli propagation and tensor networks, with normalizing flows or other neural density estimators for accurate, reusable inference. A single model, trained once, maps any new measurement record to its posterior in one forward pass---turning per-experiment inference into a fixed, up-front cost. We numerically demonstrate the framework's versatility across Pauli noise learning, quantum error mitigation, quantum state tomography, and Hamiltonian learning, with examples involving 81-qubit shallow circuits and 735-parameter inference. In each case, the approach yields accurate estimates of identifiable parameters, while posterior uncertainty provides additional diagnostics of non-identifiability and indicates where further characterization is needed. Our framework reduces data-acquisition requirements in quantum experiments and accelerates parameter inference, providing a practical route to characterizing and improving large-scale quantum systems.
Simulation of open quantum systems is undoubtedly critical to design of quantum devices and applications of quantum technologies since dynamics of open quantum systems cannot be solved analytically in general. However, the dimension of open quantum systems grows exponentially as the number of their subsystems increases or as involving complicated environments, which reduces the computational efficiency of the simulation. In this paper, we boost numerical simulation of master equations of open quantum systems from several aspects with which the total time and the occupied memory in the simulation are significantly reduced without losing precision. Our method can be applied to the simulation of non-Markovian quantum systems described by an augmented system model as well. We conduct numerical experiments on simulation of a non-Markovian spin chain. Compared with the algorithm in a well-known toolbox, QuTiP, our method can take 26.3% time and less memory under fair conditions.
In this paper, we present a gradient algorithm for identifying unknown parameters in an open quantum system from the measurements of time traces of local observables. The open system dynamics is described by a general Markovian master equation based on which the Hamiltonian identification problem can be formulated as minimizing the distance between the real time traces of the observables and those predicted by the master equation. The unknown parameters can then be learned with a gradient descent algorithm from the measurement data. We verify the effectiveness of our algorithm in a circuit QED system described by a Jaynes-Cummings model whose Hamiltonian identification has been rarely considered. We also show that our gradient algorithm can learn the spectrum of a non-Markovian environment based on an augmented system model.