Virtual distillation using measurements of multiple copies of a quantum circuit have recently been proposed as a method of noise mitigation of expectation values. Circuit decompositions known as B gates were found only for 1-local Hamiltonians, however practical problems for chemistry require n -local Hamiltonians, which cannot be corrected with B gates. We discover low depth circuit decompositions for expectation values for n -local Pauli strings by combining multiple projections to recover the correct measurement statistics or expectation values. Our method adds linear entangling gates with the number of qubits, but it requires extra measurements. Furthermore, in applications to find ground states such as the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm, the variational principle is required which states that the energy cannot go below the ground-state energy. We find that the variational principle is violated when using B gates and is preserved if we use our low depth decomposition on all expectation values. We perform a demonstration on real devices, and we show that our decomposition can mitigate real experimental noise in VQE for the H 2 molecule with a two-qubit tapered mapping, H 3 with three qubits, and H 2 with four qubits. Our decomposition provides a way to perform duplicate circuit virtual distillation on real devices at significantly lower depth and for arbitrary observables. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Virtual distillation using measurements of multiple copies of a quantum circuit have recently been proposed as a method of noise mitigation of expectation values. Circuit decompositions known as B gates were found only for 1-local Hamiltonians, however practical problems for chemistry require n -local Hamiltonians, which cannot be corrected with B gates. We discover low depth circuit decompositions for expectation values for n -local Pauli strings by combining multiple projections to recover the correct measurement statistics or expectation values. Our method adds linear entangling gates with the number of qubits, but it requires extra measurements. Furthermore, in applications to find ground states such as the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm, the variational principle is required which states that the energy cannot go below the ground-state energy. We find that the variational principle is violated when using B gates and is preserved if we use our low depth decomposition on all expectation values. We perform a demonstration on real devices, and we show that our decomposition can mitigate real experimental noise in VQE for the H 2 molecule with a two-qubit tapered mapping, H 3 with three qubits, and H 2 with four qubits. Our decomposition provides a way to perform duplicate circuit virtual distillation on real devices at significantly lower depth and for arbitrary observables. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Recent practical approaches for the use of current generation noisy quantum devices in the simulation of quantum many-body problems have been dominated by the use of a variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). These coupled quantum-classical algorithms leverage the ability to perform many repeated measurements to avoid the currently prohibitive gate depths often required for exact quantum algorithms, with the restriction of a parametrized circuit to describe the states of interest. In this work, we show how the calculation of zero-temperature dynamic correlation functions defining the linear response characteristics of quantum systems can also be recast into a modified VQE algorithm, which can be incorporated into the current variational quantum infrastructure. This allows for these important physical expectation values describing the dynamics of the system to be directly converged on the frequency axis, and they approach exactness over all frequencies as the flexibility of the parametrization increases. The frequency resolution hence does not explicitly scale with gate depth, which is approximately twice as deep as a ground-state VQE. We apply the method to compute the single-particle Green's function of ab initio dihydrogen and lithium hydride molecules, and demonstrate the use of a practical active space embedding approach to extend to larger systems. While currently limited by the fidelity of two-qubit gates, whose number is increased compared to the ground-state algorithm on current devices, we believe the approach shows potential for the extraction of frequency dynamics of correlated systems on near-term quantum processors.
Virtual distillation is a promising error-mitigation technique that exploits multiple copies of a noisy quantum state to estimate observables as if measured on a purified state. Although originally introduced in the context of bosonic many-body systems under the name of virtual cooling, its development and applications have largely focused on qubit-based quantum computation. Here, we establish a framework for virtual distillation in bosonic quantum information processing and continuous-variable quantum computing. Building on a diagonalization of cyclic shift operators implemented with passive linear-optical interferometers, we derive experimentally accessible protocols for estimating virtually distilled expectation values of observables relevant to bosonic architectures. In particular, we show how to recover noise-mitigated expectation values of number operators, phase-shift operators, and arbitrary quadratures from multi-copy measurements. For number operators, we further demonstrate the estimation of virtually distilled correlators of arbitrary order through the characteristic function of the photon-number distribution. We apply the framework to states affected by photon loss and dephasing, two of the dominant noise mechanisms in bosonic quantum computation, and quantify the resulting suppression of noise contributions. Our results extend virtual distillation beyond its original setting and provide a practical route toward error-mitigated measurements in bosonic quantum processors using experimentally available linear-optical resources.
We conducted a thorough evaluation of various state-of-the-art strategies to prepare the ground state wavefunction of a system on a quantum computer, specifically within the framework of variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). Despite the advantages of VQE and its variants, the current quantum computational chemistry calculations often provide inaccurate results for larger molecules, mainly due to the polynomial growth in the depth of quantum circuits and the number of two-qubit gates, such as CNOT gates. To alleviate this problem, we aim to design efficient quantum circuits that would outperform the existing ones on the current noisy quantum devices. In this study, we designed a novel quantum circuit that reduces the required circuit depth and number of two-qubit entangling gates by about 60%, while retaining the accuracy of the ground state energies close to the chemical accuracy. Moreover, even in the presence of device noise, these novel shallower circuits yielded substantially low error rates than the existing approaches for predicting the ground state energies of molecules. By considering the umbrella inversion process in ammonia molecule as an example, we demonstrated the advantages of this new approach and estimated the energy barrier for the inversion process.
Virtual distillation has been proposed as an error mitigation protocol for estimating the expectation values of observables in quantum algorithms. It proceeds by creating a cyclic permutation of M noisy copies of a quantum state using a sequence of controlled-swap gates. If the noise does not shift the dominant eigenvector of the density operator away from the ideal state, then the error in expectation-value estimation can be exponentially reduced with M . In practice, subsequent error mitigation techniques are required to suppress the effect of noise in the cyclic permutation circuit itself, leading to increased experimental complexity. Here, we perform a careful analysis of the effect of uncorrelated, identical noise in the cyclic permutation circuit and find that the estimation of expectation value of observables are robust against dephasing noise. We support the analytical result with numerical simulations and find that 67% of errors are reduced for M=2 , with physical dephasing error probabilities as high as 10% . Our results imply that a broad class of quantum algorithms can be implemented with higher accuracy in the near-term with qubit platforms where non-dephasing errors are suppressed, such as superconducting bosonic qubits and Rydberg atoms.
Recent breakthroughs have opened the possibility of intermediate-scale quantum computing with tens to hundreds of qubits, and shown the potential for solving classical challenging problems, such as in chemistry and condensed matter physics. However, the high accuracy needed to surpass classical computers poses a critical demand on the circuit depth, which is severely limited by the non-negligible gate infidelity, currently around 0.1%-1%. The limited circuit depth places restrictions on the performance of variational quantum algorithms (VQA) and prevents VQAs from exploring desired nontrivial quantum states. To resolve this problem, we propose a paradigm of Schrödinger-Heisenberg variational quantum algorithms (SHVQA). Using SHVQA, the expectation values of operators on states that require very deep circuits to prepare can now be efficiently measured by rather shallow circuits. The idea is to incorporate a virtual Heisenberg circuit, which acts effectively on the measurement observables, into a real shallow Schrödinger circuit, which is implemented realistically on the quantum hardware. We choose a Clifford virtual circuit, whose effect on the Hamiltonian can be seen as efficient classical processing. Yet, it greatly enlarges the state's expressivity, realizing much larger unitary t designs. Our method enables accurate quantum simulation and computation that otherwise are only achievable with much deeper circuits or more accurate operations conventionally. This has been verified in our numerical experiments for a better approximation of random states, higher-fidelity solutions to the XXZ model, and the electronic structure Hamiltonians of small molecules. Thus, together with effective quantum error mitigation, our work paves the way for realizing accurate quantum computing algorithms with near-term quantum devices.
The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a widely employed method to solve electronic structure problems in the current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. However, due to inherent noise in the NISQ devices, VQE results on NISQ devices often deviate significantly from the results obtained on noiseless statevector simulators or traditional classical computers. The iterative nature of VQE further amplifies the errors in each loop. Recent works have explored ways to integrate deep neural networks (DNN) with VQE to mitigate iterative errors, albeit primarily limited to the noiseless statevector simulators. In this work, we trained DNN models across various quantum circuits and examined the potential of two DNN-VQE approaches, DNN1 and DNNF, for predicting the ground state energies of small molecules in the presence of device noise. We carefully examined the accuracy of the DNN1, DNNF, and VQE methods on both noisy simulators and real quantum devices by considering different ansatzes of varying qubit counts and circuit depths. Our results illustrate the advantages and limitations of both VQE and DNN-VQE approaches. Notably, both DNN1 and DNNF methods consistently outperform the standard VQE method in providing more accurate ground state energies in noisy environments. However, despite being more accurate than VQE, the energies predicted using these methods on real quantum hardware remain meaningful only at reasonable circuit depths (depth = 15, gates = 21). At higher depths (depth = 83, gates = 112), they deviate significantly from the exact results. Additionally, we find that DNNF does not offer any notable advantage over VQE in terms of speed. Consequently, our study recommends DNN1 as the preferred method for obtaining quick and accurate ground state energies of molecules on current quantum hardware, particularly for quantum circuits with lower depth and fewer qubits.