Simulating open quantum systems is an essential technique for understanding complex physical phenomena and advancing quantum technologies. Some quantum algorithms simulate Lindblad dynamics exponentially accurately, i.e., they achieve logarithmically short circuit depth in terms of accuracy, but they need to coherently encode all possible jump operators with a large ancilla consumption. Minimizing the gate and ancilla counts while achieving such a logarithmic scaling in accuracy remains an important challenge. In this work, we present two randomized quantum algorithms for simulating general Lindblad dynamics with multiple jump operators aimed at an observable estimation that achieves a circuit depth with not only logarithmic scaling in accuracy but also either partial or complete independence from the parameters specifying the Lindbladian. This is based on a novel random circuit compilation method that leverages dissipative processes with only a single jump operator, leading to the proposed methods using minimal ancilla qubits— 4 + ⌈ log 2 M ⌉ in the first case and seven in the other, where each single jump operator has at most M Pauli strings. In addition, we numerically demonstrate the practical advantage over existing approaches by providing a detailed analysis of the required gate and ancilla counts. This work represents a significant step toward making open quantum system simulations more feasible on early fault-tolerant quantum computing devices.
Simulating open quantum systems is an essential technique for understanding complex physical phenomena and advancing quantum technologies. Some quantum algorithms simulate Lindblad dynamics exponentially accurately, i.e., they achieve logarithmically short circuit depth in terms of accuracy, but they need to coherently encode all possible jump operators with a large ancilla consumption. Minimizing the gate and ancilla counts while achieving such a logarithmic scaling in accuracy remains an important challenge. In this work, we present two randomized quantum algorithms for simulating general Lindblad dynamics with multiple jump operators aimed at an observable estimation that achieves a circuit depth with not only logarithmic scaling in accuracy but also either partial or complete independence from the parameters specifying the Lindbladian. This is based on a novel random circuit compilation method that leverages dissipative processes with only a single jump operator, leading to the proposed methods using minimal ancilla qubits— 4 + ⌈ log 2 M ⌉ in the first case and seven in the other, where each single jump operator has at most M Pauli strings. In addition, we numerically demonstrate the practical advantage over existing approaches by providing a detailed analysis of the required gate and ancilla counts. This work represents a significant step toward making open quantum system simulations more feasible on early fault-tolerant quantum computing devices.
We present an efficient algorithm for simulating open quantum systems dynamics described by the Lindblad master equation on quantum computers, addressing key challenges in the field. In contrast to existing approaches, our method achieves two significant advancements. First, we employ a repetition of unitary gates on a set of n system qubits and, remarkably, only a single ancillary bath qubit representing the environment. It follows that, for the typical case of m locality of the Lindblad operators, we reach an exponential improvement of the number of ancilla in terms of m and up to a polynomial improvement in ancilla overhead for large n with respect to other approaches. Although stochasticity is introduced, requiring multiple circuit realizations, the sampling overhead is independent of the system size. Second, we show that, under fixed accuracy conditions, our algorithm enables a reduction in the number of Trotter steps compared to other approaches, substantially decreasing circuit depth. These advancements hold particular significance for near-term quantum computers, where minimizing both width and depth is critical due to inherent noise in their dynamics. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
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 XY 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.
Quantum computers promise efficient simulation of Lindbladian dynamics in open quantum systems, with broad applications in quantum chemistry, quantum error correction, and quantum state preparation. However, simulating open systems is more challenging than simulating closed systems, inherently requiring nonunitary operations. Existing approaches face unique challenges: methods with higher theoretical efficiency demand numerous ancillae and multiqubit operations that are experimentally challenging, while more experimentally feasible methods incur deep quantum circuits to control simulation errors. Here, we introduce a powerful framework, the linear combinations of superoperators, to systematically compensate for simulation errors and overcome these challenges. Utilizing simple gates and experimentally accessible Trotter decompositions, our approach achieves an exponential reduction in circuit depth with respect to the simulation precision, if only two ancillas are allowed to be used. We further extend the approach to time-dependent Lindbladians, achieving for the first time logarithmic depth in precision. Numerical simulations demonstrate significant performance advantages, establishing our method as a practical and scalable solution for simulating open quantum systems on near-term quantum hardware.
Inspired by classical Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, dissipative quantum algorithms are an emerging class of methods for preparing quantum states on a quantum computer. They operate by simulating a dissipative process governed by a mathematical operator known as the Lindbladian. The performance of these algorithms can be limited by the sequential implementation of the Lindbladian's constituent jump operators, which leads to high circuit depth. To address this issue, this work analyzes a parallelization scheme to implement jump operators simultaneously. We leverage the structure of geometric locality to show that individual jump operators remain spatially localized. This exponentially reduces the circuit depth per time step, resulting in an overall polynomial improvement. Numerical experiments demonstrate a 53x reduction in query depth for a 1D benchmark system of 100 qubits. The reduced circuit depth makes dissipative algorithms more practical for near-term quantum computing.
Open-system dynamics govern decoherence, transport, and engineered dissipation in quantum many-body systems. We propose a quantum algorithm for simulating time-independent, finite-range Lindblad dynamics with bounded local strength on a constant-dimensional lattice of n sites, allowing noncommuting jump operators. For time T≥1 and diamond-norm error at most ε, it has depth O(Tpolylog(nT/ε)) and gate count O(nTpolylog(nT/ε)). These results extend the HHKL spatial decomposition to open systems. The main obstacle is that the reversible overlap corrections used for unitary dynamics have no direct analogue for dissipative channels. We overcome this by retaining the environment in a shared unitary dilation, keeping information lost from the system coherently available and making the spatial corrections reversible. We prove exponential occupation bounds for the environmental states generated by the decomposition, allowing compact representation and coherent simulation of local factors on the inputs that arise. The construction reduces each short-time evolution to a constant number of parallel layers on regions of logarithmic diameter, using nearest-neighbour gates and polylogarithmic auxiliary density.
We also prove unconditional worst-case lower bounds using time-independent, purely dissipative processes that transport quantum information. For circuits with local quantum and classical communication, the lower bounds are Ω(nT) for the expected gate count and Ω(T) for depth on time scales up to the lattice diameter. They match the upper bounds' leading time and volume dependence up to polylogarithmic factors. At fixed time and sufficiently small fixed error, we further prove a depth lower bound of Ω(logn/loglogn), showing that global accuracy can require increasing depth as the lattice grows.
We develop randomized quantum algorithms to simulate quantum collision models, also known as repeated interaction schemes, which provide a rich framework to model various open-system dynamics. The underlying technique involves composing time evolutions of the total (system, bath, and interaction) Hamiltonian and intermittent tracing out the environment degrees of freedom. This results in a unified framework where any near-term Hamiltonian simulation algorithm can be incorporated to implement an arbitrary number of such collisions on early fault-tolerant quantum computers: we do not assume access to specialized oracles such as block encodings and minimize the number of ancilla qubits needed. In particular, using the correspondence between Lindbladian evolution and completely positive trace-preserving maps arising out of memoryless collisions, we provide an end-to-end quantum algorithm for simulating Lindbladian dynamics. For a system of n-qubits, we exhaustively compare the circuit depth needed to estimate the expectation value of an observable with respect to the reduced state of the system after time t while employing different near-term Hamiltonian simulation techniques, requiring at most n+2 qubits in all. We compare the cnot gate counts of the various approaches for estimating the transverse field magnetization of a 10-qubit XX-Heisenberg spin chain under amplitude damping. Finally, we also develop a framework to efficiently simulate an arbitrary number of memory-retaining collisions, i.e., where environments interact, leading to non-Markovian dynamics. Overall, our methods can leverage quantum collision models for both Markovian and non-Markovian dynamics on early fault-tolerant quantum computers, shedding light on the advantages and limitations of simulating open systems dynamics using this framework.