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arXiv:2410.21251 · PRX Quantum

Shot-Noise Reduction for Lattice Hamiltonians

Timo Eckstein, Refik Mansuroglu, Stefan Wolf, Ludwig Nützel, Stephan Tasler, Martin Kliesch, Michael J. Hartmann

Published Jan 14, 2026• 2 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Efficiently estimating energy expectation values of quantum lattice systems on quantum computers is a crucial subroutine for various quantum algorithms, which can lead to significant overhead due to the high measurement shot numbers required. We introduce a measurement strategy tailored to quantum lattice systems and (noisy) energy eigenstates. It is based on a geometric partitioning of the Hamiltonian into local patches and performing the measurements in the eigenbases of those patches. The resulting energy estimator has a smaller variance than the ones of Pauli grouping schemes, which leads to a reduction of the total number of shots. We provide rigorous guarantees for this variance improvement for energy eigenstates, also in the presence of depolarizing noise. As one can choose the subsystem size, one can ensure that measurement circuits remain within implementable depths. In numerical experiments, we demonstrate the shot count reduction for various 2D lattice models, including the transverse field XY and Ising models, as well as the Fermi-Hubbard model. We find sampling improvements of several orders of magnitude already for plaquettes of two by two qubits, where the required readout circuits remain very moderate in depth.

DOI
10.1103/xy36-drb3

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Efficiently estimating energy expectation values of quantum lattice systems on quantum computers is a crucial subroutine for various quantum algorithms, which can lead to significant overhead due to the high measurement shot numbers required. We introduce a measurement strategy tailored to quantum lattice systems and (noisy) energy eigenstates. It is based on a geometric partitioning of the Hamiltonian into local patches and performing the measurements in the eigenbases of those patches. The resulting energy estimator has a smaller variance than the ones of Pauli grouping schemes, which leads to a reduction of the total number of shots. We provide rigorous guarantees for this variance improvement for energy eigenstates, also in the presence of depolarizing noise. As one can choose the subsystem size, one can ensure that measurement circuits remain within implementable depths. In numerical experiments, we demonstrate the shot count reduction for various 2D lattice models, including the transverse field XY and Ising models, as well as the Fermi-Hubbard model. We find sampling improvements of several orders of magnitude already for plaquettes of two by two qubits, where the required readout circuits remain very moderate in depth.
Estimating expectation values on near-term quantum computers often requires a prohibitively large number of measurements. One widely-used strategy to mitigate this problem has been to partition an operator's Pauli terms into sets of mutually commuting operators. Here, we introduce a method that relaxes this constraint of commutativity, instead allowing for entirely arbitrary terms to be grouped together, save a locality constraint. The key idea is that we decompose the operator into arbitrary tensor products with bounded tensor size, ignoring Pauli commuting relations. This method -- named kkk-NoCliD (kkk-local non-Clifford diagonalization) -- allows one to measure in far fewer bases in most cases, often (though not always) at the cost of increasing the circuit depth. We introduce several partitioning algorithms tailored to different Hamiltonian classes. For electronic structure, we numerically demonstrate the existence of threshold values of kkk for which kkk-NoCliD leads to the lowest shot counts, though we leave improved partitioning algorithms to future work. We focus primarily on three Hamiltonian classes -- molecular vibrational structure, Fermi-Hubbard, and Bose-Hubbard -- and show that kkk-NoCliD reduces the number of circuit shots, often by a very large margin, and often even for kkk as small as 2.
Measuring quantum observables by grouping terms that can be rotated to sums of only products of Pauli ˆz operators (Ising form) is proven to be efficient in near-term quantum computing algorithms.This approach requires extra unitary transformations to rotate the state of interest so that the measurement of a fragment’s Ising form would be equivalent to measurement of the fragment for the unrotated state. These extra rotations allow one to perform a fewer number of measurements by grouping more terms into the measurable fragments with a lower overall estimator variance. However, previous estimations of the number of measurements did not take into account non-unit fidelity of quantum gates implementing the additional transformations. Through a circuit fidelity reduction, additional transformations introduce extra uncertainty and increase the needed number of measurements. Here we consider a simple model for errors introduced by additional gates needed in schemes involving grouping of commuting Pauli products. For a set of molecular electronic Hamiltonians, we confirm that the numbers of measurements in schemes using non-local qubit rotations are still lower than those in their local qubit rotation counterparts, even after accounting for uncertainties introduced by additional gates.
Expectation value estimation is ubiquitous in quantum algorithms. The expectation value of a Hamiltonian, which is essential in various practical applications, is often estimated by measuring a large number of Pauli strings on quantum computers and performing classical post-processing. In the case of nnn-qubit molecular Hamiltonians in quantum chemistry calculations, it is necessary to evaluate O(n4)O(n^4)O(n4) Pauli strings, requiring a large number of measurements for accurate estimation. To reduce the measurement cost, we assess an existing idea that uses two copies of an nnn-qubit quantum state of interest and coherently measures them in the Bell basis, which enables the simultaneous estimation of the absolute values of expectation values of all the nnn-qubit Pauli strings. We numerically investigate the efficiency of energy estimation for molecular Hamiltonians of up to 12 qubits. The results show that, when the target precision is no smaller than tens of milli-Hartree, this method requires fewer measurements than conventional sampling methods. This suggests that the method may be useful for many applications that rely on expectation value estimation of Hamiltonians and other observables as well when moderate precision is sufficient.
Variational quantum algorithms are promising applications of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers. These algorithms consist of a number of separate prepare-and-measure experiments that estimate terms in a Hamiltonian. The number of terms can become overwhelmingly large for problems at the scale of NISQ hardware that may soon be available. We use unitary partitioning (developed independently by Izmaylov et al. [J. Chem. Theory Comput. 16, 190 (2020)]) to define variational quantum eigensolver procedures in which additional unitary operations are appended to the ansatz preparation to reduce the number of terms. This approach may be scaled to use all coherent resources available after ansatz preparation. We also study the use of asymmetric qubitization to implement the additional coherent operations with lower circuit depth. Using this technique, we find a constant factor speedup for lattice and random Pauli Hamiltonians. For electronic structure Hamiltonians, we prove that linear term reduction with respect to the number of orbitals, which has been previously observed in numerical studies, is always achievable. For systems represented on 10--30 qubits, we find that there is a reduction in the number of terms by approximately an order of magnitude. Applied to the plane-wave dual-basis representation of fermionic Hamiltonians, however, unitary partitioning offers only a constant factor reduction. Finally, we show that noncontextual Hamiltonians may be reduced to effective commuting Hamiltonians using unitary partitioning.
We consider the problem of estimating the energy of a quantum state preparation for a given Hamiltonian in Pauli decomposition. For various quantum algorithms, in particular in the context of quantum chemistry, it is crucial to have energy estimates with error bounds, as captured by guarantees on the problem's sampling complexity. In particular, when limited to Pauli basis measurements, the smallest sampling complexity guarantee comes from a simple single-shot estimator via a straightforward argument based on Hoeffding's inequality. In this work, we construct an adaptive estimator using the state's actual variance. Technically, our estimation method is based on the Empirical Bernstein stopping (EBS) algorithm and grouping schemes, and we provide a rigorous tail bound, which leverages the state's empirical variance. In a numerical benchmark of estimating ground-state energies of several Hamiltonians, we demonstrate that EBS consistently improves upon elementary readout guarantees up to one order of magnitude.
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.