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arXiv:2402.09376 · The Journal of Chemical Physics

Exactly solvable Hamiltonian fragments obtained from a direct sum of Lie algebras

S. M. Patel, Artur F. Izmaylov

Published May 20, 2024• 4 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Exactly solvable Hamiltonians are useful in the study of quantum many-body systems using quantum computers. In the variational quantum eigensolver, a decomposition of the target Hamiltonian into exactly solvable fragments can be used for the evaluation of the energies via repeated quantum measurements. In this work, we apply more general classes of exactly solvable qubit Hamiltonians than previously considered to address the Hamiltonian measurement problem. The most general exactly solvable Hamiltonians we use are defined by the condition that within each simultaneous eigenspace of a set of Pauli symmetries, the Hamiltonian acts effectively as an element of a direct sum of so(N) Lie algebras and can, therefore, be measured using a combination of unitaries in the associated Lie group, Clifford unitaries, and mid-circuit measurements. The application of such Hamiltonians to decomposing molecular electronic Hamiltonians via graph partitioning techniques shows a reduction in the total number of measurements required to estimate the expectation value compared to previously used exactly solvable qubit Hamiltonians.

DOI
10.1063/5.0207195

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Exactly solvable Hamiltonians are useful in the study of quantum many-body systems using quantum computers. In the variational quantum eigensolver, a decomposition of the target Hamiltonian into exactly solvable fragments can be used for the evaluation of the energies via repeated quantum measurements. In this work, we apply more general classes of exactly solvable qubit Hamiltonians than previously considered to address the Hamiltonian measurement problem. The most general exactly solvable Hamiltonians we use are defined by the condition that within each simultaneous eigenspace of a set of Pauli symmetries, the Hamiltonian acts effectively as an element of a direct sum of so(N) Lie algebras and can, therefore, be measured using a combination of unitaries in the associated Lie group, Clifford unitaries, and mid-circuit measurements. The application of such Hamiltonians to decomposing molecular electronic Hamiltonians via graph partitioning techniques shows a reduction in the total number of measurements required to estimate the expectation value compared to previously used exactly solvable qubit Hamiltonians.
Exactly solvable Hamiltonians that can be diagonalized by using relatively simple unitary transformations are of great use in quantum computing. They can be employed for the decomposition of interacting Hamiltonians either in Trotter-Suzuki approximations of the evolution operator for the quantum phase estimation algorithm or in the quantum measurement problem for the variational quantum eigensolver. One of the typical forms of exactly solvable Hamiltonians is a linear combination of operators forming a modestly sized Lie algebra. Very frequently, such linear combinations represent noninteracting Hamiltonians and thus are of limited interest for describing interacting cases. Here, we propose an extension in which the coefficients in these combinations are substituted by polynomials of the Lie algebra symmetries. This substitution results in a more general class of solvable Hamiltonians, and for qubit algebras, it is related to the recently proposed noncontextual Pauli Hamiltonians. In fermionic problems, this substitution leads to Hamiltonians with eigenstates that are single Slater determinants but with different sets of single-particle states for different eigenstates. The new class of solvable Hamiltonians can be measured efficiently using quantum circuits with gates that depend on the result of a midcircuit measurement of the symmetries.
A central roadblock in the realization of variational quantum eigensolvers on quantum hardware is the high overhead associated with measurement repetitions, which hampers the computation of complex problems, such as the simulation of mid- and large-sized molecules. In this work, we propose a novel measurement protocol which relies on computing an approximation of the Hamiltonian expectation value. The method involves measuring cheap grouped operators directly and estimating the residual elements through iterative measurements of new grouped operators in different bases, with the process being truncated at a certain stage. The measured elements comprehend the operators defined by the Hard-Core Bosonic approximation, which encode electron-pair annihilation and creation operators. These can be easily decomposed into three self-commuting groups which can be measured simultaneously. Applied to molecular systems, the method achieves a reduction of 30% to 80% in the number of measurement and gates depth in the measuring circuits compared to state-of-the-art methods. This provides a scalable and cheap measurement protocol, advancing the application of variational approaches for simulating physical systems.
Reducing the number of measurements required to estimate the expectation value of an observable is crucial for the variational quantum eigensolver to become competitive with state-of-the-art classical algorithms. To measure complicated observables such as a molecular electronic Hamiltonian, one of the common strategies is to partition the observable into linear combinations (fragments) of mutually commutative Pauli products. The total number of measurements for obtaining the expectation value is then proportional to the sum of variances of individual fragments. We propose a method that lowers individual fragment variances by modifying the fragments without changing the total observable expectation value. Our approach is based on adding Pauli products ("ghosts") that are compatible with members of multiple fragments. The total expectation value does not change because a sum of coefficients for each "ghost" Pauli product introduced to several fragments is zero. Yet, these additions change individual fragment variances because of the non-vanishing contributions of "ghost" Pauli products within each fragment. The proposed algorithm minimizes individual fragment variances using a classically efficient approximation of the quantum wavefunction for variance estimations. Numerical tests on a few molecular electronic Hamiltonian expectation values show several-fold reductions in the number of measurements in the "ghost" Pauli algorithm compared to those in the other recently developed techniques.
To obtain estimates of electronic energies, the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) technique performs separate measurements for multiple parts of the system Hamiltonian. Current quantum hardware is restricted to projective single-qubit measurements, and, thus, only parts of the Hamiltonian that form mutually qubit-wise commuting groups can be measured simultaneously. The number of such groups in the electronic structure Hamiltonians grows as N 4, where N is the number of qubits, thereby putting serious restrictions on the size of the systems that can be studied. Using a partitioning of the system Hamiltonian as a linear combination of unitary operators, we found a circuit formulation of the VQE algorithm that allows one to measure a group of fully anticommuting terms of the Hamiltonian in a single series of single-qubit measurements. Numerical comparison of the unitary partitioning to previously used grouping of Hamiltonian terms based on their qubit-wise commutativity is consistent with an N -fold reduction in the number of measurable groups.
The Variational Quantum Eigensolver approach to the electronic structure problem on a quantum computer involves measurement of the Hamiltonian expectation value. Formally, quantum mechanics allows one to measure all mutually commuting or compatible operators simultaneously. Unfortunately, the current hardware permits measuring only a much more limited subset of operators that share a common tensor product eigen-basis. We introduce unitary transformations that transform any fully commuting group of operators to a group that can be measured on current hardware. These unitary operations can be encoded as a sequence of Clifford gates and let us not only measure much larger groups of terms but also to obtain these groups efficiently on a classical computer. The problem of finding the minimum number of fully commuting groups of terms covering the whole Hamiltonian is found to be equivalent to the minimum clique cover problem for a graph representing Hamiltonian terms as vertices and commutativity between them as edges. Tested on a set of molecular electronic Hamiltonians with up to 50 thousand terms, the introduced technique allows for the reduction of the number of separately measurable operator groups down to few hundreds, thus achieving up to 2 orders of magnitude reduction. Based on the test set results, the obtained gain scales at least linearly with the number of qubits.
The Monte Carlo Projective Quantum Eigensolver (MC-PQE) was recently introduced as an alternative to hybrid algorithms like the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). By using a quantum Monte Carlo-inspired scheme for energy estimation, MC\nobreakdash-PQE was found to decrease the required measurement cost relative to comparable conventional approaches. However, in the context of VQE, numerous techniques have been developed to reduce the measurement overhead by joint measurement of multiple observables. In this work, we extend these approaches to the asymmetric expectation values required in MC-PQE and assess the performance of different techniques for various molecular systems of up to 12 qubits. We find full commuting Pauli term grouping combined with tailored measurement allocation techniques leads to a 5-10×\times× reduction in standard error for the same total number of quantum measurements. Conventional Hamiltonian grouped measurement outperforms tractable classical shadows tomography based techniques for the considered systems.