This Article demonstrates how an eigendecomposition problem is inputted into a quantum circuit, how gates are applied in the quantum circuit, and how the output measurements are the correct eigenvalues. This process is known as quantum phase estimation (QPE). A quantum harmonic oscillator example, a foundational quantum physical chemistry problem, is demonstrated within the context of QPE. A particle in a box example, another quantum physical chemistry problem, may be solved by QPE with a caveat. These examples are of the limiting cases of diagonal matrices. Future advances in taking matrix inverses for solving linear sets of equations or finding ground state energies in the Schrödinger equation will use the principles implemented in this Article.
This Article demonstrates how an eigendecomposition problem is inputted into a quantum circuit, how gates are applied in the quantum circuit, and how the output measurements are the correct eigenvalues. This process is known as quantum phase estimation (QPE). A quantum harmonic oscillator example, a foundational quantum physical chemistry problem, is demonstrated within the context of QPE. A particle in a box example, another quantum physical chemistry problem, may be solved by QPE with a caveat. These examples are of the limiting cases of diagonal matrices. Future advances in taking matrix inverses for solving linear sets of equations or finding ground state energies in the Schrödinger equation will use the principles implemented in this Article.
Abstract This guide is based on the IBM Quantum course Phase Estimation and Factoring and focuses on one of the most important breakthroughs in quantum computing: the quantum phase estimation (QPE) algorithm and its application to Shor’s factoring algorithm. The lesson begins with the phase estimation problem, Solving this problem efficiently is a cornerstone of many quantum algorithms. Spectral Theorem and Mathematical Foundations The discussion starts with the spectral theorem from linear algebra. In the context of this lesson, it is applied to unitary matrices, which can be diagonalized in an orthonormal eigenbasis. This property makes it possible to extract phase information using interference effects and controlled unitary operations. Later, the same mathematical framework extends to Hermitian operators, which are central to quantum mechanics and Hamiltonian simulation. Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) The Quantum Phase Estimation algorithm combines: Controlled unitary operations Superposition and interference The Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT) The QFT plays a crucial role by transforming phase information encoded in amplitudes into measurable computational basis states. Importantly, the QFT can be implemented efficiently with a quantum circuit whose complexity scales polynomially with the number of qubits. From Phase Estimation to Shor’s Algorithm By applying QPE to a specific modular exponentiation operator, one obtains Shor’s algorithm, an efficient quantum algorithm for integer factorization. Shor’s algorithm demonstrates an exponential speedup over the best-known classical factoring algorithms and has profound implications for cryptography, particularly for RSA-based systems. Significance This lesson illustrates a major milestone in quantum computing: It connects abstract linear algebra (spectral theorem) to concrete algorithmic advantage. It shows how quantum interference enables extraction of hidden periodicity. It demonstrates a real-world cryptographic impact through efficient factorization. Through hands-on experimentation on IBM Q, theoretical concepts are translated into working quantum circuits, reinforcing the deep relationship between mathematics, algorithm design, and quantum computational power.
Quantum phase estimation (QPE) serves as a building block of many different quantum algorithms and finds important applications in computational chemistry problems. Despite the rapid development of quantum hardware, experimental demonstration of QPE for chemistry problems remains challenging due to its large circuit depth and the lack of quantum resources to protect the hardware from noise with fully fault-tolerant protocols. In the present work, we take a step towards fault-tolerant quantum computing by demonstrating a QPE algorithm on a Quantinuum trapped-ion computer. We employ a Bayesian approach to QPE and introduce a routine for optimal parameter selection, which we combine with a [[ n + 2 , n , 2 ]] quantum error detection code carefully tailored to the hardware capabilities. As a simple quantum chemistry example, we take a hydrogen molecule represented by a two-qubit Hamiltonian and estimate its ground state energy using our QPE protocol. In the experiment, we use the quantum circuits containing as many as 920 physical two-qubit gates to estimate the ground state energy within 6 × 10 − 3 hartree of the exact value. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
This is a set of lecture notes used in a graduate topic class in applied mathematics called ``Quantum Algorithms for Scientific Computation'' at the Department of Mathematics, UC Berkeley during the fall semester of 2021. These lecture notes focus only on quantum algorithms closely related to scientific computation, and in particular, matrix computation. The main purpose of the lecture notes is to introduce quantum phase estimation (QPE) and ``post-QPE'' methods such as block encoding, quantum signal processing, and quantum singular value transformation, and to demonstrate their applications in solving eigenvalue problems, linear systems of equations, and differential equations. The intended audience is the broad computational science and engineering (CSE) community interested in using fault-tolerant quantum computers to solve challenging scientific computing problems.
Simulating quantum mechanical evolutions in general is difficult on classical computers because the size of the Hilbert space grows exponentially with the number of particles involved in the simulations. However, a quantum computer, which obeys the laws of quantum mechanics, is believed to perform such simulations more efficiently. The time evolution operator, a unitary matrix, of a quantum system acts as a quantum gate changing the state of the system in time. Therefore, any computation on quantum computers can be interpreted as a unitary transformation on quantum state vectors. Generally, quantum gates are sufficiently simple operations so as to avoid difficulty in the physical implementation. The implementation of a general given computation represented by a unitary matrix on quantum computers requires finding an array of elementary quantum gates describing the desired computation. This describes a matrix decomposition problem known as the quantum circuit design problem. In this dissertation, we address the following questions concerning quantum circuit designs: How hard is it to find suitable quantum circuits for a given computation? What are the possible circuit design methods? How do we apply these to simulations of quantum problems, in particular quantum chemistry problems? To answer these questions, we categorize methods for designing quantum circuits as evolutionary algorithms and deterministic methods. We apply our developed group leaders optimization algorithm, an evolutionary algorithm, to find quantum circuits for known quantum algorithms and the simulation of molecular Hamiltonians. Then, we present a deterministic circuit design approach to produce universal circuits, which can be programmable. Moreover, we show how to use these programmable circuit designs within the quantum phase estimation algorithm to find eigenvalues of nonunitary matrices and study resonances in quantum systems. Finally, the quantum phase estimation algorithm is employed to efficiently solve ranking problems: in particular, multiple network alignment is considered to find the similarities between protein-protein interaction networks and molecular networks.
This chapter covers the quantum algorithmic primitive called quantum phase estimation. Quantum phase estimation is an essential quantum algorithmic primitive that computes an estimate for the eigenvalue of a unitary operator, given as input an eigenstate of the operator. It features prominently in many end-to-end quantum algorithms, for example, computing ground state energies of physical systems in the areas of condensed matter physics and quantum chemistry. We carefully discuss nuances of quantum phase estimation that appear when it is applied to a superposition of eigenstates with different eigenvalues.
Estimating a quantum phase is a necessary task in a wide range of fields of quantum science. To accomplish this task, two well-known methods have been developed in distinct contexts, namely, Ramsey interferometry (RI) in atomic and molecular physics and quantum phase estimation (QPE) in quantum computing. We demonstrate that these canonical examples are instances of a larger class of phase estimation protocols, which we call reductive quantum phase estimation (RQPE) circuits. Here, we present an explicit algorithm that allows one to create an RQPE circuit. This circuit distinguishes an arbitrary set of phases with a smaller number of qubits and unitary applications, thereby solving a general class of quantum hypothesis testing to which RI and QPE belong. We further demonstrate a tradeoff between measurement precision and phase distinguishability, which allows one to tune the circuit to be optimal for a specific application. Published by the American Physical Society 2024