2017/11/30 by Ian D. Kivlichan, Jarrod McClean, Nathan Wiebe +4 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph #physics.chem-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.120.110501
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 110501 (2018) · 8 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2018/02/03 · arxiv updated 2018/03/15
As physical implementations of quantum architectures emerge, it is increasingly important to consider the cost of algorithms for practical connectivities between qubits. We show that by using an arrangement of gates that we term the fermionic swap network, we can simulate a Trotter step of the electronic structure Hamiltonian in exactly N depth and with N2/2 two-qubit entangling gates, and prepare arbitrary Slater determinants in at most N/2 depth, all assuming only a minimal, linearly connected architecture. We conjecture that no explicit Trotter step of the electronic structure Hamiltonian is possible with fewer entangling gates, even with arbitrary connectivities. These results represent significant practical improvements on the cost of most Trotter based algorithms for both variational and phase estimation based simulation of quantum chemistry.