Time ordered products

C. S. Lam

We present a decomposition formula for Un, an integral of time-ordered products of operators, in terms of sums of products of the more primitive quantities Cm, which are the integrals of time-ordered commutators of the same operators. The resulting factorization enables a summation over n to be carried out to yield an explicit expression for the time-ordered exponential, an expression which turns out to be an exponential function of Cm. The Campbell-Baker-Hausdorff formula and the nonabelian eikonal formula obtained previously are both special cases of this result. Typeset using REVTEX 1 I.

Junaid Aftab, Dong An, Konstantina Trivisa

The well-conditioned multi-product formula (MPF), proposed by Low-Kliuchnikov-Wiebe (2019), is a high-order, time-independent Hamiltonian simulation algorithm that implements a linear combination of low-order product formulas. Prior work established its well-conditioned algorithmic construction and near-optimal time and precision dependence, but did not simultaneously provide an explicit error bound in terms of nested commutators, which has left its practical advantage uncertain. In this work, we provide a rigorous complexity analysis of the well-conditioned MPF, explicitly establishing both commutator scaling and near-optimal dependence on time and precision through a rigorous Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff (BCH) and variation-of-parameters-based error analysis. Using our improved complexity estimates, we present several physically relevant applications where the second-order-based MPF asymptotically outperforms the second-order product formula in all three aspects of system size, time, and precision. We further demonstrate that, while MPF yields worse scalings than the best post-Trotter methods in most applications, there exist certain parameter regimes in the nonlocal fast-transform Bogoliubov-de Gennes model where MPF can outperform both leading post-Trotter methods and product formulas with fixed or adaptively optimized order.

Bart Verberck

C. A. A. de Carvalho, H. M. Nussenzveig

Mauro E. S. Morales, Pedro C. S. Costa, Giacomo Pantaleoni +3 more

Abstract Quantum algorithms for simulation of Hamiltonian evolution are often based on product formulae. The fractal methods give a systematic way to find arbitrarily high-order product formulae, but result in a large number of exponentials. On the other hand, product formulae with fewer exponentials can be found by numerical solution of simultaneous non-linear equations. It is also possible to reduce the cost of long-time simulations by processing, where a kernel is repeated and a processor need only be applied at the beginning and end of the simulation. In this work, we found thousands of new product formulae, and numerically tested these formulae, together with many formulae from prior literature. We provide methods to fairly compare product formulae of different lengths and different orders. For the case of 8th order, we have found new product formulae with exceptional performance, about two orders of magnitude better accuracy than prior work, both in the processed and non-processed cases. The processed product formula provides the best performance due to being shorter than the non-processed product formula. It outperforms all other tested product formulae over a range of many orders of magnitude in system parameters T (time) and ε (allowable error). That includes reasonable combinations of parameters to be used in quantum algorithms, where the size of the simulation is large enough to be classically intractable, but not so large it takes an impractically long time on a quantum computer.