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arXiv:2410.10732 · Advanced Quantum Technologies

Efficient Simulation of Open Quantum Systems on NISQ Trapped‐Ion Hardware

Colin Burdine, Nora M. Bauer, George Siopsis, Enrique Pacis Blair

Published Feb 19, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Simulating open quantum systems, which interact with external environments, presents significant challenges on noisy intermediate‐scale quantum (NISQ) devices due to limited qubit resources and noise. In this study, an efficient framework is proposed for simulating open quantum systems on NISQ hardware by leveraging a time‐perturbative Kraus operator representation of the system's dynamics. This approach avoids the computationally expensive Trotterization method and exploits the Lindblad master equation to represent time evolution in a compact form, particularly for systems satisfying specific commutation relations. The efficiency of this method is demonstrated by simulating quantum channels, such as the continuous‐time Pauli channel and damped harmonic oscillators, on NISQ trapped‐ion hardware, including IonQ Harmony and Quantinuum H1‐1. Additionally, hardware‐agnostic error mitigation techniques are introduced, including Pauli channel fitting and quantum depolarizing channel inversion, to enhance the fidelity of quantum simulations. These results show strong agreement between the simulations on real quantum hardware and exact solutions, highlighting the potential of Kraus‐based methods for scalable and accurate simulation of open quantum systems on NISQ devices. This framework opens pathways for simulating more complex systems under realistic conditions in the near term.

DOI
10.1002/qute.202400606

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Abstract Simulating open quantum systems, which interact with external environments, presents significant challenges on noisy intermediate‐scale quantum (NISQ) devices due to limited qubit resources and noise. In this study, an efficient framework is proposed for simulating open quantum systems on NISQ hardware by leveraging a time‐perturbative Kraus operator representation of the system's dynamics. This approach avoids the computationally expensive Trotterization method and exploits the Lindblad master equation to represent time evolution in a compact form, particularly for systems satisfying specific commutation relations. The efficiency of this method is demonstrated by simulating quantum channels, such as the continuous‐time Pauli channel and damped harmonic oscillators, on NISQ trapped‐ion hardware, including IonQ Harmony and Quantinuum H1‐1. Additionally, hardware‐agnostic error mitigation techniques are introduced, including Pauli channel fitting and quantum depolarizing channel inversion, to enhance the fidelity of quantum simulations. These results show strong agreement between the simulations on real quantum hardware and exact solutions, highlighting the potential of Kraus‐based methods for scalable and accurate simulation of open quantum systems on NISQ devices. This framework opens pathways for simulating more complex systems under realistic conditions in the near term.
Abstract The simulation of quantum systems is one of the flagship applications of near‐term NISQ (noisy intermediate‐scale quantum) computing devices. Efficiently simulating the rich, non‐unitary dynamics of open quantum systems remains challenging on NISQ hardware. Current simulation methods for open quantum systems employ time‐stepped Trotter product formulas (“Trotterization”) which can scale poorly with respect to the simulation time and system dimension. Here, a new simulation method is proposed based on the derivation of a time‐perturbative Kraus operator series representation of the system. A class of open quantum systems is identified for which this method produces circuits of time‐independent depth, which may serve as a desirable alternative to Trotterization, especially on NISQ devices.
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Quantum Computing in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era has shown promising applications in machine learning, optimization, and cryptography. Despite these progresses, challenges persist due to system noise, errors, and decoherence. These system noises complicate the simulation of quantum systems. The depolarization channel is a standard tool for simulating a quantum system’s noise. However, modeling such noise for practical applications is computationally expensive when we have limited hardware resources, as is the case in the NISQ era. This work proposes a modified representation for a single-qubit depolarization channel. Our modified channel uses two Kraus operators based only on X and Z Pauli matrices. Our approach reduces the computational complexity from six to four matrix multiplications per channel execution. Experiments on a Quantum Machine Learning (QML) model on the Iris dataset across various circuit depths and depolarization rates validate that our approach maintains the model’s accuracy while improving efficiency. This simplified noise model enables more scalable simulations of quantum circuits under depolarization, advancing capabilities in the NISQ era.
Quantum simulation of open quantum systems in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era is hindered by the non-unitary nature of dissipative dynamics and the limited quantum resources available on near-term quantum processors. In this work, we propose a resource-efficient algorithm for simulating Lindbladian dynamics on NISQ devices. For open quantum systems with Pauli dissipations, we first derive a compact and stable mixed-unitary adjoint channel that approximates the target dissipative dynamics and enables ancilla-free implementation through trajectory sampling. To further reduce the circuit depth required for implementing the sampled trajectories, we introduce an adaptive variational quantum trajectory compression framework. In this framework, a depth-adaptive parameterized quantum circuit is trained to approximate repeated Trotterized Hamiltonian simulation operators, which are then used to replace repeated unitary segments appearing in the sampled trajectories. Importantly, the training procedure can also be performed without auxiliary qubits. Numerical simulations of the dissipative quantum XYXYXY model demonstrate the accuracy and resource efficiency of the proposed algorithm. Our results provide a practical route toward ancilla-free and depth-reduced simulation of open quantum systems on near-term quantum hardware.
Abstract Quantum simulation represents the most promising quantum application to demonstrate quantum advantage on near-term noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers, yet available quantum simulation algorithms are prone to errors and thus difficult to realize with limited circuit depth on nowadays quantum devices. Herein, we propose a novel scheme to utilize intrinsic gate errors of NISQ devices to enable controllable simulation of open quantum system dynamics without ancillary qubits or explicit bath engineering, thus turning unwanted quantum noises into useful quantum resources. Specifically, we simulate the energy transfer process in a photosynthetic dimer system on IBM-Q cloud. By employing tailored decoherence-inducing gates, we show that quantum dissipative dynamics can be simulated efficiently across coherent-to-incoherent regimes with results comparable to those of the numerically exact classical method. Moreover, we demonstrate a calibration routine that enables consistent and predictive simulations of open-quantum system dynamics in the intermediate coupling regime. This work provides a new direction for quantum advantage in the NISQ era.