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arXiv:2504.10247

Exponentially Decaying Quantum Simulation Error with Noisy Devices

Jue Xu, Chu Zhao, Fan, Junyu, Qi Zhao

Published Apr 14, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum simulation is a promising way toward practical quantum advantage, but noise in current quantum hardware poses a significant obstacle. We prove that not only the physical error but also the algorithmic error in a single Trotter step decreases exponentially with the circuit depth. This theoretical finding is validated by our numerical results over various Hamiltonians, initial states, and noise channels. Furthermore, we derive the optimal number of Trotter steps and the noise requirement to guarantee total simulation precision. To explicitly show the requirements for robust quantum simulation, we plot a phase diagram of the accumulated error in terms of circuit depth and noise rate. At last, we demonstrate that our improved error analysis leads to significant resourcesaving for fault-tolerant Trotter circuits. By addressing these aspects, this work provides fresh and systematic insight on the practical quantum advantage through quantum simulation.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2504.10247

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Quantum simulation is a promising way toward practical quantum advantage, but noise in current quantum hardware poses a significant obstacle. We prove that not only the physical error but also the algorithmic error in a single Trotter step decreases exponentially with the circuit depth. This theoretical finding is validated by our numerical results over various Hamiltonians, initial states, and noise channels. Furthermore, we derive the optimal number of Trotter steps and the noise requirement to guarantee total simulation precision. To explicitly show the requirements for robust quantum simulation, we plot a phase diagram of the accumulated error in terms of circuit depth and noise rate. At last, we demonstrate that our improved error analysis leads to significant resourcesaving for fault-tolerant Trotter circuits. By addressing these aspects, this work provides fresh and systematic insight on the practical quantum advantage through quantum simulation.
Quantum computers can efficiently simulate many-body systems. As a widely used Hamiltonian simulation tool, the Trotter-Suzuki scheme splits the evolution into the number of Trotter steps NNN and approximates the evolution of each step by a product of exponentials of each individual term of the total Hamiltonian. The algorithmic error due to the approximation can be reduced by increasing NNN, which however requires a longer circuit and hence inevitably introduces more physical errors. In this work, we first study such a trade-off and numerically find the optimal number of Trotter steps Nopt{N}_{\mathrm{opt}}Nopt​ given a physical error model in a near-term quantum hardware. Practically, physical errors can be suppressed using recently proposed error mitigation methods. We then extend physical error mitigation methods to suppress the algorithmic error in Hamiltonian simulation. By exploiting the simulation results with different numbers of Trotter steps $N\ensuremath{\le}{N}_{\mathrm{opt}}$, we can infer the exact simulation result within a higher accuracy and hence mitigate algorithmic errors. We numerically test our scheme with a five-qubit system and show significant improvements in the simulation accuracy by applying both physical and algorithmic error mitigations.
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Understanding the dynamics of quantum systems is crucial in many areas of physics, but simulating many-body systems presents significant challenges due to the large Hilbert space to navigate and the exponential growth of computational overhead. Quantum computers offer a promising platform to overcome these challenges, particularly for simulating the time evolution with Hamiltonians. Trotterization is a widely used approach among available algorithms in this regard, and well suited for near-term quantum devices. However, it introduces algorithmic Trotter errors due to the non-commutativity of Hamiltonian components. Several techniques such as multi-product formulas have been developed to mitigate Trotter errors, but often require deep quantum circuits, which can introduce additional physical errors. In this work, we propose a resource-efficient scheme to reduce the algorithmic Trotter error with relatively shallow circuit depth. We develop a profiling method by introducing an auxiliary parameter to estimate the error effects in expectation values, enabling significant error suppression with a fixed number of Trotter steps. Our approach offers an efficient way of quantum simulation on near-term quantum processors with shallow circuits.
The Suzuki-Trotter decomposition, which digitalizes quantum time evolution, provides a promising framework for simulating quantum dynamics on quantum hardware and exploring quantum advantage over classical computation. However, conventional Trotter circuits require a large number of non-local gates, lowering their faithfulness to the ideal dynamics when implemented on current noisy quantum hardware. While most previous studies have focused on circuit optimization, we instead propose a new Trotter decomposition that is intrinsically circuit-efficient for simulating quantum dynamics on near-term devices. Our method substantially reduces both the residual error by Trotter decomposition and the number of CNOT operations compared to conventional Trotter decompositions by exploiting the symmetry of the target model to construct an effective Hamiltonian with fewer two-qubit gates. We demonstrate the noise robustness of the proposed approach through numerical simulations of a nine-site Heisenberg model under realistic noise, and further validate its experimental practicality on the IBM superconducting device, achieving a state fidelity exceeding 0.980.980.98 when combined with quantum error mitigation in the three-site case. The proposed circuit design is also compatible with existing circuit optimization techniques. Our results establish a practical route toward noise-resilient quantum simulation in many-body dynamics.
Digital quantum simulation of many-body dynamics faces a tension between algorithmic Trotter error and physical noise that accumulates with circuit depth. Typical higher-order product formulas mitigate the algorithmic error at the cost of deeper circuits. Our benchmark shows that, within the limited physical error budget, the feasible advantage is confined to absolute errors well below the 10−210^{-2}10−2 scale, which vanishes under noise levels of current quantum hardware. In sharp contrast to the previous Trotter error mitigation methods, we introduce a constant-depth multi-product formula (cd-MPF) that suppresses the Trotter error by combining multiple circuits at fixed circuit depth. We identify an auxiliary parameter ααα, which reshapes the Trotter error terms while leaving the target evolution invariant. The classical linear combination of the measured expectation values cancels the leading (Δt)2(Δt)^{2}(Δt)2 algorithmic contribution and steepens the Trotter-error scaling with the two-qubit circuit depth ddd from d−2d^{-2}d−2 to d−4d^{-4}d−4. Combined with physical-noise mitigation, our method can serve as a key ingredient for realizing long-time quantum dynamics simulation on near-term hardware.
Fault-tolerant quantum computing is a promising tool for simulating molecules and materials, but frequently-considered applications require substantial resources, and the gap between hardware capabilities and requirements remains significant. We propose quantum simulation of nanographene πππ-systems as relevant and scalable problems to span the gap between early and large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computing. We examine the efficiency of Trotterized quantum simulation, present a detailed analysis of worst-case, average-case and energy eigenvalue Trotter errors, and show that these Trotter error estimates vary by orders of magnitude. Trotter eigenvalue errors are obtained from a novel tensor-network-based approach which allows spectral analysis of product formulas for systems beyond brute-force calculation. Notably, we observe a Trotter error cancellation phenomenon whereby the Trotter error for energy differences between low-lying eigenstates is significantly smaller than the Trotter error for absolute energies, resulting in approximately an order of magnitude circuit depth reduction for quantum phase estimation calculation of energy gaps. This is a significant result because for most chemical applications, only energy differences are of practical relevance. We estimate that calculation of energy gaps to chemical accuracy between the ground- and excited-states within the Pariser--Parr--Pople model for large 2D nanographenes (up to 140 spin orbitals) requires circuits with <3.2×107< 3.2 \times 10^7<3.2×107 Toffoli gates. This work shows that considering details of chemically-relevant applications and exploiting error cancellation can lead to substantial reductions in resource requirements.