Trotter Step Research Articles

Digital quantum simulation, learning of the Floquet Hamiltonian, and quantum chaos of the kicked top

The kicked top is one of the paradigmatic models in the study of quantum chaos (Haake et al 2018 Quantum Signatures of Chaos (Springer Series in Synergetics vol 54)). Recently it has been shown that the onset of quantum chaos in the kicked top can be related to the proliferation of Trotter errors in digital quantum simulation (DQS) of collective spin systems. Specifically, the proliferation of Trotter errors becomes manifest in expectation values of few-body observables strongly deviating from the target dynamics above a critical Trotter step, where the spectral statistics of the Floquet operator of the kicked top can be predicted by random matrix theory. In this work, we study these phenomena in the framework of Hamiltonian learning (HL). We show how a recently developed HL protocol can be employed to reconstruct the generator of the stroboscopic dynamics, i.e., the Floquet Hamiltonian, of the kicked top. We further show how the proliferation of Trotter errors is revealed by HL as the transition to a regime in which the dynamics cannot be approximately described by a low-order truncation of the Floquet–Magnus expansion. This opens up new experimental possibilities for the analysis of Trotter errors on the level of the generator of the implemented dynamics, that can be generalized to the DQS of quantum many-body systems in a scalable way. This paper is in memory of our colleague and friend Fritz Haake.

Characterization and Verification of Trotterized Digital Quantum Simulation Via Hamiltonian and Liouvillian Learning

The goal of digital quantum simulation is to approximate the dynamics of a given target Hamiltonian via a sequence of quantum gates, a procedure known as Trotterization. The quality of this approximation can be controlled by the so called Trotter step, that governs the number of required quantum gates per unit simulation time. The stroboscopic dynamics generated by Trotterization is effectively described by a time-independent Hamiltonian, referred to as the Floquet Hamiltonian. In this work, we propose Floquet Hamiltonian learning to reconstruct the experimentally realized Floquet Hamiltonian order-by-order in the Trotter step. This procedure is efficient, i.e., it requires a number of measurements that scales polynomially in the system size, and can be readily implemented in state-of-the-art experiments. With numerical examples, we propose several applications of our method in the context of verification of quantum devices: from the characterization of the distinct sources of errors in digital quantum simulators to determining the optimal operating regime of the device. We show that our protocol provides the basis for feedback-loop design and calibration of new types of quantum gates. Furthermore it can be extended to the case of non-unitary dynamics and used to learn Floquet Liouvillians, thereby offering a way of characterizing the dissipative processes present in NISQ quantum devices.

Resource estimations for the Hamiltonian simulation in correlated electron materials

Correlated electron materials, such as superconductors and magnetic materials, are regarded as fascinating targets in quantum computing. However, the quantitative resources, specifically the number of quantum gates and qubits, required to perform a quantum algorithm to simulate correlated electron materials remain unclear. In this study, we estimate the resources required for the Hamiltonian simulation algorithm for correlated electron materials, specifically for organic superconductors, iron-based superconductors, binary transition-metal oxides, and perovskite oxides, using the fermionic swap network. The effective Hamiltonian derived using the ab initio downfolding method is adopted for the Hamiltonian simulation, and a procedure for the resource estimation by using the fermionic swap network for the effective Hamiltonians including the exchange interactions is proposed. For example, in the system for the ${10}^{2}$ unit cells, the estimated numbers of gates per Trotter step and qubits are approximately ${10}^{7}$ and ${10}^{3}$, respectively, on average for the correlated electron materials. Furthermore, our results show that the number of interaction terms in the effective Hamiltonian, especially for the Coulomb interaction terms, is dominant in the gate resources when the number of unit cells constituting the whole system is up to ${10}^{2}$, whereas the number of fermionic swap operations is dominant when the number of unit cells is more than ${10}^{3}$.

Quantum dynamics simulations beyond the coherence time on noisy intermediate-scale quantum hardware by variational Trotter compression

We demonstrate a postquench dynamics simulation of a Heisenberg model on present-day IBM quantum hardware that extends beyond the coherence time of the device. This is achieved using a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm that propagates a state using Trotter evolution and then performs a classical optimization that effectively compresses the time-evolved state into a variational form. When iterated, this procedure enables simulations to arbitrary times with an error controlled by the compression fidelity and a fixed Trotter step size. We show how to measure the required cost function, the overlap between the time-evolved and variational states, on present-day hardware, making use of several error mitigation methods. In addition to carrying out simulations on real hardware, we investigate the performance and scaling behavior of the algorithm with noiseless and noisy classical simulations. We find the main bottleneck in going to larger system sizes to be the difficulty of carrying out the optimization of the noisy cost function.

Spectral analysis of product formulas for quantum simulation

We consider the time-independent Hamiltonian simulation using the first order Lie–Trotter–Suzuki product formula under the assumption that the initial state is supported on a low-dimension subspace. By comparing the spectral decomposition of the original Hamiltonian and the effective Hamiltonian, we obtain better upper bounds for various conditions. Especially, we show that the Trotter step size needed to estimate an energy eigenvalue within precision ϵ using quantum phase estimation can be improved in scaling from ϵ to ϵ1/2 for a large class of systems. Our results also depend on the gap condition of the simulated Hamiltonian.

Trotter Errors from Dynamical Structural Instabilities of Floquet Maps in Quantum Simulation

Even small Trotter step sizes can lead to significant errors in the quantum simulation of spin systems, revealing a crucial interplay between physical properties of the simulated Hamiltonian and the Trotterized evolution.

Algebraic compression of quantum circuits for Hamiltonian evolution

Unitary evolution under a time-dependent Hamiltonian is a key component of simulation on quantum hardware. Synthesizing the corresponding quantum circuit is typically done by breaking the evolution into small time steps, also known as Trotterization, which leads to circuits the depth of which scales with the number of steps. When the circuit elements are limited to a subset of $SU(4)$---or equivalently, when the Hamiltonian may be mapped onto free fermionic models---several identities exist that combine and simplify the circuit. Based on this, we present an algorithm that compresses the Trotter steps into a single block of quantum gates using algebraic relations between adjacent circuit elements. This results in a fixed depth time evolution for certain classes of Hamiltonians. We explicitly show how this algorithm works for several spin models, and demonstrate its use for adiabatic state preparation of the transverse field Ising model.

Quantum error reduction with deep neural network applied at the post-processing stage

Deep neural networks (DNN) can be applied at the post-processing stage for the improvement of the results of quantum computations on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) processors. Here, we propose a method based on this idea, which is most suitable for digital quantum simulation characterized by the periodic structure of quantum circuits consisting of Trotter steps. A key ingredient of our approach is that it does not require any data from a classical simulator at the training stage. The network is trained to transform data obtained from quantum hardware with artificially increased Trotter steps number (noise level) towards the data obtained without such an increase. The additional Trotter steps are fictitious, i.e., they contain negligibly small rotations and, in the absence of hardware imperfections, reduce essentially to the identity gates. This preserves, at the training stage, information about relevant quantum circuit features. Two particular examples are considered that are the dynamics of the transverse-field Ising chain and XY spin chain, which were implemented on two real five-qubit IBM Q processors. A significant error reduction is demonstrated as a result of the DNN application that allows us to effectively increase quantum circuit depth in terms of Trotter steps.

Compressing Many-Body Fermion Operators under Unitary Constraints.

The most efficient known quantum circuits for preparing unitary coupled cluster states and applying Trotter steps of the arbitrary basis electronic structure Hamiltonian involve interleaved sequences of Fermionic Gaussian circuits and Ising interaction-type circuits. These circuits arise from factorizing the two-body operators generating those unitaries as a sum of squared one-body operators that are simulated using product formulas. We introduce a numerical algorithm for performing this factorization that has an iteration complexity no worse than single particle basis transformations of the two-body operators and often results in many times fewer squared one-body operators in the sum of squares, compared to the analytical decompositions. As an application of this numerical procedure, we demonstrate that our protocol can be used to approximate generic unitary coupled cluster operators and prepare the necessary high-quality initial states for techniques (like ADAPT-VQE) that iteratively construct approximations to the ground state.

Success of digital adiabatic simulation with large Trotter step

The simulation of adiabatic evolution has deep connections with Adiabatic Quantum Computation, the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm and adiabatic state preparation. Here we address the error analysis problem in quantum simulation of adiabatic process using Trotter formulas. We show that with additional conditions, the circuit depth can be linear in simulation time $T$. The improvement comes from the observation that the fidelity error here can't be estimated by the norm distance between evolution operators. This phenomenon is termed as the robustness of discretization in digital adiabatic simulation. It can be explained in three steps, from analytical and numerical evidence: (1). The fidelity error should be estimated by applying adiabatic theorem on the effective Hamiltonian instead. (2). Because of the specialty of Riemann-Lebesgue lemma, most adiabatic process is naturally robust against discretization. (3). As the Trotter step gets larger, the spectral gap of effective Hamiltonian tends to close, which results in the failure of digital adiabatic simulation.

Indexed improvements for real-time trotter evolution of a (1 + 1) field theory using NISQ quantum computers

Today’s quantum computers offer the possibility of performing real-time calculations for quantum field theory scattering processes motivated by high energy physics. In order to follow the successful roadmap which has been established for the calculation of static properties at Euclidean time, it is crucial to develop new algorithmic methods to deal with the limitations of current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices and to establish quantitative measures of the progress made with different devices. In this paper, we report recent progress in these directions. We show that nonlinear aspects of the trotter errors allow us to take much larger step then suggested by low-order analysis. This is crucial to reach physically relevant time scales with today’s NISQ technology. We propose to use an index averaging absolute values of the difference between the accurately calculated trotter evolution of site occupations and their actual measurements on NISQ machines (G index) as a measure to compare results that have been obtained from different hardware platforms. Using the transverse Ising model in one spatial dimension with four sites we apply this metric across several hardware platforms. We study the results including readout mitigation and Richardson extrapolations and show that the mitigated measurements are very effective based on the analysis of the trotter step size modifications. We discuss how this advance in the trotter step size procedures can improve quantum computing physics scattering results and how this technical advance can be applied to other machines and noise mitigation methods.

Simulating Hydrodynamics on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Devices with Random Circuits.

In a recent milestone experiment, Google's processor Sycamore heralded the era of "quantum supremacy" by sampling from the output of (pseudo-)random circuits. We show that such random circuits provide tailor-made building blocks for simulating quantum many-body systems on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Specifically, we propose an algorithm consisting of a random circuit followed by a trotterized Hamiltonian time evolution to study hydrodynamics and to extract transport coefficients in the linear response regime. We numerically demonstrate the algorithm by simulating the buildup of spatiotemporal correlation functions in one- and two-dimensional quantum spin systems, where we particularly scrutinize the inevitable impact of errors present in any realistic implementation. Importantly, we find that the hydrodynamic scaling of the correlations is highly robust with respect to the size of the Trotter step, which opens the door to reach nontrivial time scales with a small number of gates. While errors within the random circuit are shown to be irrelevant, we furthermore unveil that meaningful results can be obtained for noisy time evolutions with error rates achievable on near-term hardware. Our work emphasizes the practical relevance of random circuits on NISQ devices beyond the abstract sampling task.

Low rank representations for quantum simulation of electronic structure

The quantum simulation of quantum chemistry is a promising application of quantum computers. However, for N molecular orbitals, the {mathcal{O}}({N}^{4}) gate complexity of performing Hamiltonian and unitary Coupled Cluster Trotter steps makes simulation based on such primitives challenging. We substantially reduce the gate complexity of such primitives through a two-step low-rank factorization of the Hamiltonian and cluster operator, accompanied by truncation of small terms. Using truncations that incur errors below chemical accuracy allow one to perform Trotter steps of the arbitrary basis electronic structure Hamiltonian with {mathcal{O}}({N}^{3}) gate complexity in small simulations, which reduces to {mathcal{O}}({N}^{2}) gate complexity in the asymptotic regime; and unitary Coupled Cluster Trotter steps with {mathcal{O}}({N}^{3}) gate complexity as a function of increasing basis size for a given molecule. In the case of the Hamiltonian Trotter step, these circuits have {mathcal{O}}({N}^{2}) depth on a linearly connected array, an improvement over the {mathcal{O}}({N}^{3}) scaling assuming no truncation. As a practical example, we show that a chemically accurate Hamiltonian Trotter step for a 50 qubit molecular simulation can be carried out in the molecular orbital basis with as few as 4000 layers of parallel nearest-neighbor two-qubit gates, consisting of fewer than 105 non-Clifford rotations. We also apply our algorithm to iron–sulfur clusters relevant for elucidating the mode of action of metalloenzymes.

Driven-dissipative quantum mechanics on a lattice: Simulating a fermionic reservoir on a quantum computer

The driven-dissipative many-body problem remains one of the most challenging unsolved problems in quantum mechanics. The advent of quantum computers may provide a unique platform for efficiently simulating such driven-dissipative systems. But, there are many choices for how one can engineer the reservoir. One can simply employ ancilla qubits to act as a reservoir and then digitally simulate them via algorithmic cooling. A more attractive approach, which allows one to simulate an infinite reservoir, is to integrate out the bath degrees of freedom and describe the driven-dissipative system via a master equation, that can also be simulated on a quantum computer. In this work, we consider the particular case of noninteracting electrons on a lattice driven by an electric field and coupled to a fermionic thermostat. Then, we provide two different quantum circuits: the first one reconstructs the full dynamics of the system using Trotter steps, while the second one dissipatively prepares the final nonequilibrium steady state in a single step. We run both circuits on the IBM quantum experience. For circuit (i), we achieved up to five Trotter steps. When partial resets become available on quantum computers, we expect that the maximum simulation time can be significantly increased. The methods developed here suggest generalizations that can be applied to simulating interacting driven-dissipative systems.

Improved Fault-Tolerant Quantum Simulation of Condensed-Phase Correlated Electrons via Trotterization

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<105 fermionic modes can be performed with roughly O(1) and O(N2) 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.

Resource-efficient digital quantum simulation of d-level systems for photonic, vibrational, and spin-s Hamiltonians

Simulation of quantum systems is expected to be one of the most important applications of quantum computing, with much of the theoretical work so far having focused on fermionic and spin-frac{1}{2} systems. Here, we instead consider encodings of d-level (i.e., qudit) quantum operators into multi-qubit operators, studying resource requirements for approximating operator exponentials by Trotterization. We primarily focus on spin-s and truncated bosonic operators in second quantization, observing desirable properties for approaches based on the Gray code, which to our knowledge has not been used in this context previously. After outlining a methodology for implementing an arbitrary encoding, we investigate the interplay between Hamming distances, sparsity patterns, bosonic truncation, and other properties of local operators. Finally, we obtain resource counts for five common Hamiltonian classes used in physics and chemistry, while modeling the possibility of converting between encodings within a Trotter step. The most efficient encoding choice is heavily dependent on the application and highly sensitive to d, although clear trends are present. These operation count reductions are relevant for running algorithms on near-term quantum hardware because the savings effectively decrease the required circuit depth. Results and procedures outlined in this work may be useful for simulating a broad class of Hamiltonians on qubit-based digital quantum computers.

Jastrow-type Decomposition in Quantum Chemistry for Low-Depth Quantum Circuits.

We propose an efficient O(N2)-parameter ansatz that consists of a sequence of exponential operators, each of which is a unitary variant of Neuscamman's cluster Jastrow operator. The ansatz can also be derived as a decomposition of T2 amplitudes of the unitary coupled cluster with generalized singles and doubles, which gives a near full-CI energy. The proposed ansatz therefore can reproduce the uCCGSD energy, or rather will reach the exact full-CI energy because of the exponential operator product form. Because the cluster Jastrow operators are expressed by a product of number operators and the derived Pauli operator products, namely, the Jordan-Wigner strings, are all commutative, it does not require the Trotter approximation to implement to a quantum circuit and should be a good candidate for the variational quantum eigensolver algorithm of a near-term quantum computer. The accuracy of the ansatz was examined for dissociation of a nitrogen dimer, and compared with other existing O(N2)-parameter ansatzs. Not only the original ansatzs defined in the second-quantization form but also their Trotter-splitting variants, in which the cluster amplitudes are optimized to minimize the energy obtained with a few, typically single, Trotter steps, were examined by quantum circuit simulators.

Optimal working point in digitized quantum annealing

We present a study of the digitized Quantum Annealing protocol proposed by R. Barends et al., Nature 534, 222 (2016). Our analysis, performed on the benchmark case of a transverse Ising chain problem, shows that the algorithm has a well defined optimal working point for the annealing time $\tau^{\mathrm{opt}}_\mathrm{P}$ --- scaling as $\tau^{\mathrm{opt}}_\mathrm{P}\sim \mathrm{P}$, where $\mathrm{P}$ is the number of digital Trotter steps --- beyond which, the residual energy error shoots-up towards the value characteristic of the maximally disordered state. We present an analytical analysis for the translationally invariant transverse Ising chain case, but our numerical evidence suggests that this scenario is more general, surviving, for instance, the presence of disorder.

Digital quantum simulation, Trotter errors, and quantum chaos of the kicked top

This work aims at giving Trotter errors in digital quantum simulation (DQS) of collective spin systems an interpretation in terms of quantum chaos of the kicked top. In particular, for DQS of such systems, regular dynamics of the kicked top ensures convergence of the Trotterized time evolution, while chaos in the top, which sets in above a sharp threshold value of the Trotter step size, corresponds to the proliferation of Trotter errors. We show the possibility to analyze this phenomenology in a wide variety of experimental realizations of the kicked top, ranging from single atomic spins to trapped-ion quantum simulators which implement DQS of all-to-all interacting spin-1/2 systems. These platforms thus enable in-depth studies of Trotter errors and their relation to signatures of quantum chaos, including the growth of out-of-time-ordered correlators.

Quantum simulation of scattering in the quantum Ising model

We discuss real time evolution for the quantum Ising model in one spatial dimension with $N_s$ sites. In the limit where the nearest neighbor interactions $J$ in the spatial directions are small, there is a simple physical picture where qubit states can be interpreted as approximate particle occupations. Using exact diagonalization, for initial states with one or two particles, we show that for small $J$, discrete Bessel functions provide very accurate expressions for the evolution of the occupancies corresponding to initial states with one and two particles. Boundary conditions play an important role when the evolution time is long enough. We discuss a Trotter procedure to implement the evolution on existing quantum computers and discuss the error associated with the Trotter step size. We discuss the effects of gate and measurement errors on the evolution of one and two particle states using 4 and 8 qubits circuits approximately corresponding to existing or near term quantum computers.