Analogue and digital Hamiltonian simulation represent two distinct approaches to making one quantum system replicate the physical properties of another, with consequences ranging from practical applications to complexity theory and quantum gravity. They are rooted in two distinct regimes of quantum dynamics: time-independent Hamiltonians for the former; fully controllable time-dependent quantum circuits in the latter. Time-periodic Hamiltonians represent an intermediate regime. In this work, we establish a theory of Floquet simulation where we use periodically driven Hamiltonians to synthesise time-independent ones.
We show that a set of interactions $S$ can Floquet-simulate every Hamiltonian in the Lie algebra $\mathrm{Lie}(S)$, and consequently we give a complete and constructive characterisation of Floquet-universal Hamiltonians that are able to produce any target Hamiltonian. Notably, our construction uses only $O(1)$ local interaction strengths and ratios thereof, avoiding the impractical multi-scale local interaction strengths often required in analogue simulation via time-independent Hamiltonians. Instead, the construction requires a range of driving frequencies which scales polynomially with system size for important classes such as $k$-local lattice Hamiltonians. This has immediate complexity-theoretic implications, including numerous BQP-completeness and QMA-hardness results for natural physical properties and quantities studied in Floquet physics.
Analogue and digital Hamiltonian simulation represent two distinct approaches to making one quantum system replicate the physical properties of another, with consequences ranging from practical applications to complexity theory and quantum gravity. They are rooted in two distinct regimes of quantum dynamics: time-independent Hamiltonians for the former; fully controllable time-dependent quantum circuits in the latter. Time-periodic Hamiltonians represent an intermediate regime. In this work, we establish a theory of Floquet simulation where we use periodically driven Hamiltonians to synthesise time-independent ones.
We show that a set of interactions S can Floquet-simulate every Hamiltonian in the Lie algebra Lie(S), and consequently we give a complete and constructive characterisation of Floquet-universal Hamiltonians that are able to produce any target Hamiltonian. Notably, our construction uses only O(1) local interaction strengths and ratios thereof, avoiding the impractical multi-scale local interaction strengths often required in analogue simulation via time-independent Hamiltonians. Instead, the construction requires a range of driving frequencies which scales polynomially with system size for important classes such as k-local lattice Hamiltonians. This has immediate complexity-theoretic implications, including numerous BQP-completeness and QMA-hardness results for natural physical properties and quantities studied in Floquet physics.
The Floquet-Magnus expansion is a widely used tool to derive effective descriptions of time-periodic quantum systems by approximating their dynamics with a time-independent Hamiltonian. However, its standard formulation is, strictly speaking, restricted to bounded Hamiltonians. In this work, we extend its definition and analysis to a broad class of time-periodic unbounded Hamiltonians. Our approach is based on an a priori distinct nonperturbative framework for the construction of effective Hamiltonians, which we show to reproduce the Floquet-Magnus expansion. A particular strength of our framework is that it allows us to prove that the resulting effective dynamics approximates the original time evolution propagators to arbitrary order in the high-frequency limit without requiring convergence of the Floquet-Magnus expansion, a condition that is already highly restrictive even in the bounded setting. We illustrate the scope of the method on representative models: the quantum Rabi Hamiltonian in the interaction picture, and the periodically driven quantum harmonic oscillator.
Periodically driven quantum systems exhibit many fascinating phenomena absent in equilibrium systems, but their simulation is more challenging than that of static systems. Consequently, quantum simulation of these systems offers greater opportunity for achieving quantum advantage. To build the foundation for simulating time-periodic Hamiltonians, we utilize the Floquet-Hilbert space formalism to transform the Hamiltonian into a time-independent form and provide its Pauli decomposition. Within this formalism, we develop a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm, Floquet-ADAPT-VQE, that produces three key quantities that govern periodically driven quantum dynamics: the quasienergy, the associated Floquet eigenstates, and expectation values of observables with respect to these eigenstates. The latter is achieved by applying a fixed-depth quantum circuit to an initial Floquet eigenstate—an efficient construction made possible by the Floquet-Hilbert space formalism. We also identify a suitable auxiliary initial state whose squared Floquet energy is independent of the number of auxiliary qubits as well as the driving frequency, which leads to better convergence with fewer ADAPT iterations. We demonstrate our algorithm by performing numerical simulations on a periodically driven XYZ model with a magnetic field. We also explore potential applications of our algorithm for studying various non-equilibrium phenomena in periodically driven systems.
Characterizing time-periodic Hamiltonians is pivotal for validating and controlling driven quantum platforms, yet prevailing and unadjusted reconstruction methods demand dense time-domain sampling and heavy post-processing. We introduce a scalable Floquet-informed learning algorithm that represents the Hamiltonian as a truncated Fourier series and recasts parameter estimation as a compact linear inverse problem in the Floquet band picture. The algorithm is well-suited to problems satisfying mild smoothness/band-limiting. In this regime, its sample and runtime complexities scale polynomially with the Fourier cutoff, time resolution, and the number of unknown coefficients. For local Hamiltonian models, the coefficients grows polynomially with system size, yielding at most polylogarithmic dependence on the Hilbert-space dimension. Furthermore, numerical experiments on one- and two-dimensional Ising and Heisenberg lattices show fast convergence to time resolution and robustness to higher-order perturbations. An adaptive rule learns the cutoff of Fourier series, removing the need to set known truncation \textit{a priori}. These features enable practical certification and benchmarking of periodically driven platforms with rapidly decaying higher-order content, and extend naturally to near-periodic drives.
The implementation of time-evolution operators U(t) , called Hamiltonian simulation, is one of the most promising usage of quantum computers. For time-independent Hamiltonians, qubitization has recently established efficient realization of time-evolution U(t)=e−iHt , with achieving the optimal computational resource both in time t and an allowable error ε . In contrast, those for time-dependent systems require larger cost due to the difficulty of handling time-dependency. In this paper, we establish optimal/nearly-optimal Hamiltonian simulation for generic time-dependent systems with time-periodicity, known as Floquet systems. By using a so-called Floquet-Hilbert space equipped with auxiliary states labeling Fourier indices, we develop a way to certainly obtain the target time-evolved state without relying on either time-ordered product or Dyson-series expansion. Consequently, the query complexity, which measures the cost for implementing the time-evolution, has optimal and nearly-optimal dependency respectively in time t and inverse error ε , and becomes sufficiently close to that of qubitization. Thus, our protocol tells us that, among generic time-dependent systems, time-periodic systems provides a class accessible as efficiently as time-independent systems despite the existence of time-dependency. As we also provide applications to simulation of nonequilibrium phenomena and adiabatic state preparation, our results will shed light on nonequilibrium phenomena in condensed matter physics and quantum chemistry, and quantum tasks yielding time-dependency in quantum computation.
In the conventional theory of quantum computation, universality is discussed in terms of properties of unitary gate sets. In many experimental setups, however, we instead have access to a parametrized set of Hamiltonians, which can be exponentiated for any desired time. Accordingly, we formulate a continuous analogue of universality, where adding one expensive Hamiltonian control to a cheap set of local control operators allows for universal computation. We find several concrete sets of 1- or 2-local Pauli generators S and n-qubit ``magic" Hamiltonians H that together generate the full Lie algebra su(2n), with a special focus on the Ising Hamiltonian J. We propose a method to directly implement any unitary by exponentiating these generator sets, and give bounds on the needed time of application of the magic Hamiltonian H. We find that the number of applications of H needed to approximate any unitary up to accuracy ε scales exponentially in the number of qubits as expected from the standard application of the Solovay-Kitaev theorem. We also find phase transitions in the size of the generated Lie algebras as the parameters of the Ising Hamiltonian are varied. We find an algorithmic application of the Chow/Rashevskii technique to implement unitaries corresponding to iterated commutators.
We study operator dynamics in many-body quantum systems, focusing on generic features of systems that are ergodic, spatially extended, and lack conserved densities. Quantum circuits of various types provide simple models for such systems. We focus on Floquet quantum circuits, comparing their behavior with what has been found previously for circuits that are random in time. Floquet circuits, which have discrete time-translation symmetry, represent an intermediate case between circuits that are random in time and lack any symmetry, and systems with a time-independent Hamiltonian and continuous time-translation invariance. By making this comparison, one of our aims is to identify signatures of time-translation symmetry in Floquet operator dynamics. To characterize behavior we examine a variety of quantities in solvable models and numerically: operator autocorrelation functions; the partial spectral form factor; the out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC); and the paths in operator space that make the dominant contributions to the ensemble-averaged autocorrelation functions. Our most striking result is that ensemble-averaged autocorrelation functions show behavior that is distinctively different in Floquet systems compared to systems in which successive time-steps are independent. Specifically, while average autocorrelation functions decay on a microscopic timescale for circuits that are random in time, in Floquet systems they have a late-time tail with a duration that grows parametrically with the size of the operator support. In the simplest models this tail is separated from the initial decay by a minimum, so that the average autocorrelation function has an intermediate-time peak. The existence of these tails provides a way to understand deviations of the spectral form factor from random matrix behavior at times shorter than the Thouless time. In contrast to this feature in autocorrelation functions, we find no new aspects to the behavior of OTOCs for Floquet models compared to random-in-time circuits. We show that this difference between averaged autocorrelation functions and OTOCs can be understood in terms of the paths in operator space that contribute to the two quantities: paths for the former retain a limited support at late times, while paths for the latter are dominated by operator spreading.