Quantum simulation is a promising application for quantum computing. Quantum simulation algorithms may require the ability to control the time evolution unitary. Naive techniques to control a unitary can substantially increase the required computational resources. A standard approach to controlling Trotterized time evolution doubles the number of single-qubit arbitrary rotations. Here, we describe a compilation scheme that does not increase the number of arbitrary rotations for symmetric Trotterizations, which applies to second-order and higher Suzuki-Trotter decompositions. This halves the number of arbitrary rotations required to implement controlled, Trotterized time evolution compared to the standard approach. Arbitrary rotations contribute significantly to resource estimates in a fault-tolerant architecture due to the number of required magic states. Therefore, arbitrary rotations dominate the $T$-cost of fault-tolerant implementations of quantum simulation. This construction reduces the number of arbitrary rotations for controlled Trotter evolution to that of uncontrolled Trotter evolution, thereby reducing the cost of fault-tolerant quantum simulation.
Quantum simulation is a promising application for quantum computing. Quantum simulation algorithms may require the ability to control the time evolution unitary. Naive techniques to control a unitary can substantially increase the required computational resources. A standard approach to controlling Trotterized time evolution doubles the number of single-qubit arbitrary rotations. Here, we describe a compilation scheme that does not increase the number of arbitrary rotations for symmetric Trotterizations, which applies to second-order and higher Suzuki-Trotter decompositions. This halves the number of arbitrary rotations required to implement controlled, Trotterized time evolution compared to the standard approach. Arbitrary rotations contribute significantly to resource estimates in a fault-tolerant architecture due to the number of required magic states. Therefore, arbitrary rotations dominate the T-cost of fault-tolerant implementations of quantum simulation. This construction reduces the number of arbitrary rotations for controlled Trotter evolution to that of uncontrolled Trotter evolution, thereby reducing the cost of fault-tolerant quantum simulation.
Achieving practical quantum speedup with limited resources is a crucial challenge in both academic and industrial communities. To address this, a partially fault-tolerant quantum computing architecture called “space-time efficient analog rotation quantum computing architecture” (STAR architecture) been recently been proposed. This architecture focuses on minimizing resource requirements while maximizing the precision of non-Clifford gates, essential for universal quantum computation. However, nondeterministic processes such as the repeat-until-success (RUS) protocol and state injection can introduce significant computational overhead. Therefore, optimizing the logical circuit to minimize this overhead by using efficient fault-tolerant operations is essential. This paper presents an efficient method for simulating the time evolution of the two-dimensional (2D) Hubbard-model Hamiltonian, a promising application of the STAR architecture. We present two techniques, the parallel-injection protocol and adaptive injection-region updating, to reduce unnecessary time overhead specific to our architecture. By integrating these with the existing fermionic (f) technique, we develop an efficient Trotter-based time-evolution operation for the 2D Hubbard model. Our analysis reveals an acceleration of over 10 times compared to naive serial compilation. Based on this optimized compilation, we estimate the computational resources required for the quantum phase estimation of the 2D Hubbard model. For devices with a physical error rate of p phys = 10 − 4 , we estimate that approximately 6.2 × 10 4 physical qubits are required to achieve faster ground-state energy estimation of the 8 × 8 Hubbard model compared to classical computation.
Clifford+T synthesis of rotation gates is an important routine in fault-tolerant quantum compilation. While Clifford+T synthesis is scalable, it has a high overhead of tens of T gates per rotation in practice, translating to high resource estimates for many fault-tolerant algorithms. However, these well-known results, including those using probabilistic mixtures [Quantum 7, 1208 (2023)], are independent of the rotation angle θ, requiring O(log1/δ) T gates. We show that it is possible to do much better for small angles, reducing the T cost to O~(θ2/δ), and returning to existing O(log1/δ) results in the worst case. This is particularly important since many algorithms, such as Trotterization, are dominated by small-angle rotations. Further, we perform a detailed theoretical and numerical study of quasi-probabilities, which can further reduce the total T cost of large circuits by orders of magnitude with only a small overhead in sample complexity. We also develop a scheme based on quasi-probability mixtures of Clifford+T fallback channels. We derive new θ-dependent formulas that can be used for resource estimation of fault-tolerant quantum algorithms. As an application of our results, we show that the gate cost of Trotterization circuits compiled to a Clifford+T gate set is constant in the small Trotter step size limit, and can be reduced by orders of magnitude even for large step sizes. The cost of fault-tolerant Trotterization for a variety of applications should be re-examined in light of these results. Our work dispels the widely-stated claim that Clifford+T rotation synthesis has a high cost independent of θ, and further develops a scalable quasi-probability method for rotation synthesis. We also expect our results to bring forward useful early fault-tolerant quantum computing by reducing required magic state resources.
In designing quantum control, it is generally required to simulate the controlled system evolution with a classical computer. However, computing the time evolution operator can be quite resource consuming since the total Hamiltonian is often hard to diagonalize. In this paper, we mitigate this issue by substituting the time evolution segments with their Trotter decompositions, which reduces the propagator into a combination of single-qubit operations and fixed-time system evolutions. The resulting procedure can provide substantial speed gain with acceptable costs in the propagator error. As a demonstration, we apply the proposed strategy to improve the efficiency of the gradient ascent pulse engineering algorithm for searching optimal control fields. Furthermore, we show that the higher-order Trotter decompositions can provide efficient Ans\"atze for the variational quantum algorithm, leading to improved performance in solving the ground-state problem. The strategy presented here is also applicable for many other quantum optimization and simulation tasks.
Fault-tolerant quantum simulation requires compiling symmetry-preserving time evolutions into discrete gate sets. Standard Clifford+T synthesis can break continuous symmetries even when the target evolution preserves them, causing compiled simulations to lose essential features of the original system. We develop a fault-tolerant compilation framework that preserves SU(2) symmetry exactly. We characterize the number-theoretic obstruction preventing symmetry-preserving unitary Clifford+T circuits from approximating arbitrary SU(2)-symmetric evolutions and circumvent it using measurement and feed-forward. The resulting synthesis confines compilation errors to the symmetry-preserving operator algebra rather than introducing symmetry-breaking perturbations.
We demonstrate the algorithm by simulating transport in the one-dimensional Heisenberg model. At a lower matched T-count, for instance, 54 T gates per two-site Trotter step, standard synthesis yields an incorrect transport exponent, whereas our symmetry-preserving compilation reproduces the expected exponent for the same expected T-count. If instead each approach is allocated whatever resources are necessary to estimate this exponent to the same accuracy, our construction reduces the T-count by approximately a factor of five. We further extend the framework to gauge symmetries in lattice gauge theories and to particle-number and spin symmetries in fermionic models relevant to quantum chemistry and the Fermi-Hubbard model.
These results show that symmetry-preserving fault-tolerant compilation can qualitatively change the effects of synthesis error while substantially reducing the resources required for quantum simulation.
Recent work has deployed linear combinations of unitaries techniques to reduce the cost of fault-tolerant quantum simulations of correlated electron models. Here, we show that one can sometimes improve upon those results with optimized implementations of Trotter-Suzuki-based product formulas. We show that low-order Trotter methods perform surprisingly well when used with phase estimation to compute relative precision quantities (e.g. energies per unit cell), as is often the goal for condensed-phase systems. In this context, simulations of the Hubbard and plane-wave electronic structure models with N < 10 5 fermionic modes can be performed with roughly O ( 1 ) and O ( N 2 ) T complexities. We perform numerics revealing tradeoffs between the error and gate complexity of a Trotter step; e.g., we show that split-operator techniques have less Trotter error than popular alternatives. By compiling to surface code fault-tolerant gates and assuming error rates of one part per thousand, we show that one can error-correct quantum simulations of interesting, classically intractable instances with a few hundred thousand physical qubits.
We propose a variational alternative to the Trotter-Suzuki decomposition that provides greater control over errors while preserving the unitary structure of time evolution. The variational parameters in our ansatz are derived from a global action principle, where Euler-Lagrange equations govern their optimal dynamics. Unlike conventional wavefunction-based variational methods, our approach specifically targets the time evolution operation and this allows a single set of optimized parameters to be applied to any initial state for a fixed Hamiltonian avoiding costly optimization procedures. Our method outperforms the standard Trotter-Suzuki formulas, typically achieving higher accuracy than higher-order Suzuki schemes. This translates directly to quantum computing applications, where it enables the design of quantum circuits with fewer gates which reduces noise and improves precision. Although we focus on quantum dynamics, the method is broadly applicable to problems involving general time-evolution operators. Applied to various model Hamiltonians, our approach reduces errors by factors of 2 to 5 compared to Trotter-Suzuki decompositions, demonstrating its promise for accurate quantum simulation with improved efficiency. In certain cases, the variational ansatz achieves higher accuracy than more complex higher-order Suzuki formulas while reducing the gate count by nearly half within a single circuit layer. Furthermore, we derive approximate analytical expressions for the variational parameters up to cubic order in time, valid for generic Hamiltonians. These approximations enable long-time quantum simulations with improved accuracy over equivalent Suzuki decompositions, providing ready-to-use evolution formulas that match Suzuki's gate complexity while delivering better performance.