arXiv subjects

Jarrod McClean

Publications and source records attributed to Jarrod McClean.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Exponential learning advantages with conjugate states and minimal quantum memory

The ability of quantum computers to directly manipulate and analyze quantum states stored in quantum memory allows them to learn about aspects of our physical world that would otherwise be invisible given a modest number of measurements. Here we investigate a new learning resource which could be available to quantum computers in the future -- measurements on the unknown state accompanied by its complex conjugate $\rho \otimes \rho^\ast$. For a certain shadow tomography task, we surprisingly find that measurements on only copies of $\rho \otimes \rho^\ast$ can be exponentially more powerful than measurements on $\rho^{\otimes K}$, even for large $K$. This expands the class of provable exponential advantages using only a constant overhead quantum memory, or minimal quantum memory, and we provide a number of examples where the state $\rho^\ast$ is naturally available in both computational and physical applications. In addition, we precisely quantify the power of classical shadows on single copies under a generalized Clifford ensemble and give a class of quantities that can be efficiently learned. The learning task we study in both the single copy and quantum memory settings is physically natural and corresponds to real-space observables with a limit of bosonic modes, where it achieves an exponential improvement in detecting certain signals under a noisy background. We quantify a new and powerful resource in quantum learning, and we believe the advantage may find applications in improving quantum simulation, learning from quantum sensors, and uncovering new physical phenomena.

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arXiv2021

Nearly Optimal Quantum Algorithm for Estimating Multiple Expectation Values

Many quantum algorithms involve the evaluation of expectation values. Optimal strategies for estimating a single expectation value are known, requiring a number of state preparations that scales with the target error $\varepsilon$ as $\mathcal{O}(1/\varepsilon)$. In this paper, we address the task of estimating the expectation values of $M$ different observables, each to within additive error $\varepsilon$, with the same $1/\varepsilon$ dependence. We describe an approach that leverages Gily\'en et al.'s quantum gradient estimation algorithm to achieve $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{M}/\varepsilon)$ scaling up to logarithmic factors, regardless of the commutation properties of the $M$ observables. We prove that this scaling is worst-case optimal in the high-precision regime if the state preparation is treated as a black box, even when the operators are mutually commuting. We highlight the flexibility of our approach by presenting several generalizations, including a strategy for accelerating the estimation of a collection of dynamic correlation functions.

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arXiv2020

Focus beyond quadratic speedups for error-corrected quantum advantage

In this perspective, we discuss conditions under which it would be possible for a modest fault-tolerant quantum computer to realize a runtime advantage by executing a quantum algorithm with only a small polynomial speedup over the best classical alternative. The challenge is that the computation must finish within a reasonable amount of time while being difficult enough that the small quantum scaling advantage would compensate for the large constant factor overheads associated with error-correction. We compute several examples of such runtimes using state-of-the-art surface code constructions under a variety of assumptions. We conclude that quadratic speedups will not enable quantum advantage on early generations of such fault-tolerant devices unless there is a significant improvement in how we would realize quantum error-correction. While this conclusion persists even if we were to increase the rate of logical gates in the surface code by more than an order of magnitude, we also repeat this analysis for speedups by other polynomial degrees and find that quartic speedups look significantly more practical.

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arXiv2019

Efficient and Noise Resilient Measurements for Quantum Chemistry on Near-Term Quantum Computers

Variational algorithms are a promising paradigm for utilizing near-term quantum devices for modeling electronic states of molecular systems. However, previous bounds on the measurement time required have suggested that the application of these techniques to larger molecules might be infeasible. We present a measurement strategy based on a low rank factorization of the two-electron integral tensor. Our approach provides a cubic reduction in term groupings over prior state-of-the-art and enables measurement times three orders of magnitude smaller than those suggested by commonly referenced bounds for the largest systems we consider. Although our technique requires execution of a linear-depth circuit prior to measurement, this is compensated for by eliminating challenges associated with sampling non-local Jordan-Wigner transformed operators in the presence of measurement error, while enabling a powerful form of error mitigation based on efficient postselection. We numerically characterize these benefits with noisy quantum circuit simulations for ground state energies of strongly correlated electronic systems.

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arXiv2019

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 $N < 10^5$ fermionic modes can be performed with roughly $O(1)$ and $O(N^2)$ 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.

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arXiv2018

Majorana loop stabilizer codes for error correction of fermionic quantum simulations

Fermion-to-qubit mappings that preserve geometric locality are especially useful for simulating lattice fermion models (e.g., the Hubbard model) on a quantum computer. They avoid the overhead associated with geometric non-local parity terms in mappings such as the Jordan-Wigner transformation and the Bravyi-Kitaev transformation. As a result, they often provide quantum circuits with lower depth and gate complexity. In such encodings, fermionic states are encoded in the common +1 eigenspace of a set of stabilizers, akin to stabilizer quantum error-correcting codes. Here, we discuss several known geometric locality-preserving mappings and their abilities to correct/detect single-qubit errors. We introduce a geometric locality-preserving map, whose stabilizers correspond to products of Majorana operators on closed paths of the fermionic hopping graph. We show that our code, which we refer to as the Majorana loop stabilizer code (MLSC) can correct all single-qubit errors on a 2-dimensional square lattice, while previous geometric locality-preserving codes can only detect single-qubit errors on the same lattice. Compared to existing codes, the MLSC maps the relevant fermionic operators to lower-weight qubit operators despite having higher code distance. Going beyond lattice models, we demonstrate that the MLSC is compatible with state-of-the-art algorithms for simulating quantum chemistry, and can offer those simulations the same error-correction properties without additional asymptotic overhead. These properties make the MLSC a promising candidate for error-mitigated quantum simulations of fermions on near-term devices.

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arXiv2018

Encoding Electronic Spectra in Quantum Circuits with Linear T Complexity

We construct quantum circuits which exactly encode the spectra of correlated electron models up to errors from rotation synthesis. By invoking these circuits as oracles within the recently introduced "qubitization" framework, one can use quantum phase estimation to sample states in the Hamiltonian eigenbasis with optimal query complexity $O(λ/ ε)$ where $λ$ is an absolute sum of Hamiltonian coefficients and $ε$ is target precision. For both the Hubbard model and electronic structure Hamiltonian in a second quantized basis diagonalizing the Coulomb operator, our circuits have T gate complexity $O({N + \log (1/ε}))$ where $N$ is number of orbitals in the basis. This enables sampling in the eigenbasis of electronic structure Hamiltonians with T complexity $O(N^3 /ε+ N^2 \log(1/ε)/ε)$. Compared to prior approaches, our algorithms are asymptotically more efficient in gate complexity and require fewer T gates near the classically intractable regime. Compiling to surface code fault-tolerant gates and assuming per gate error rates of one part in a thousand reveals that one can error correct phase estimation on interesting instances of these problems beyond the current capabilities of classical methods using only about a million superconducting qubits in a matter of hours.

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arXiv2018

Quantum chemistry calculations on a trapped-ion quantum simulator

Quantum-classical hybrid algorithms are emerging as promising candidates for near-term practical applications of quantum information processors in a wide variety of fields ranging from chemistry to physics and materials science. We report on the experimental implementation of such an algorithm to solve a quantum chemistry problem, using a digital quantum simulator based on trapped ions. Specifically, we implement the variational quantum eigensolver algorithm to calculate the molecular ground state energies of two simple molecules and experimentally demonstrate and compare different encoding methods using up to four qubits. Furthermore, we discuss the impact of measurement noise as well as mitigation strategies and indicate the potential for adaptive implementations focused on reaching chemical accuracy, which may serve as a cross-platform benchmark for multi-qubit quantum simulators.

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arXiv2018

Application of fermionic marginal constraints to hybrid quantum algorithms

Many quantum algorithms, including recently proposed hybrid classical/quantum algorithms, make use of restricted tomography of the quantum state that measures the reduced density matrices, or marginals, of the full state. The most straightforward approach to this algorithmic step estimates each component of the marginal independently without making use of the algebraic and geometric structure of the marginals. Within the field of quantum chemistry, this structure is termed the fermionic $n$-representability conditions, and is supported by a vast amount of literature on both theoretical and practical results related to their approximations. In this work, we introduce these conditions in the language of quantum computation, and utilize them to develop several techniques to accelerate and improve practical applications for quantum chemistry on quantum computers. We show that one can use fermionic $n$-representability conditions to reduce the total number of measurements required by more than an order of magnitude for medium sized systems in chemistry. We also demonstrate an efficient restoration of the physicality of energy curves for the dilation of a four qubit diatomic hydrogen system in the presence of three distinct one qubit error channels, providing evidence these techniques are useful for pre-fault tolerant quantum chemistry experiments.

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arXiv2018

Quantum Simulation of Electronic Structure with Linear Depth and Connectivity

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 $N^2/2$ 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.

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arXiv2018

Low Depth Quantum Simulation of Electronic Structure

Quantum simulation of the electronic structure problem is one of the most researched applications of quantum computing. The majority of quantum algorithms for this problem encode the wavefunction using $N$ Gaussian orbitals, leading to Hamiltonians with ${\cal O}(N^4)$ second-quantized terms. We avoid this overhead and extend methods to the condensed phase by utilizing a dual form of the plane wave basis which diagonalizes the potential operator, leading to a Hamiltonian representation with ${\cal O}(N^2)$ second-quantized terms. Using this representation we can implement single Trotter steps of the Hamiltonians with linear gate depth on a planar lattice. Properties of the basis allow us to deploy Trotter and Taylor series based simulations with respective circuit depths of ${\cal O}(N^{7/2})$ and $\widetilde{\cal O}(N^{8/3})$ for fixed charge densities - both are large asymptotic improvements over all prior results. Variational algorithms also require significantly fewer measurements to find the mean energy in this basis, ameliorating a primary challenge of that approach. We conclude with a proposal to simulate the uniform electron gas (jellium) using a low depth variational ansatz realizable on near-term quantum devices. From these results we identify simulations of low density jellium as a promising first setting to explore quantum supremacy in electronic structure.

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arXiv2015

Chemical Basis of Trotter-Suzuki Errors in Quantum Chemistry Simulation

Although the simulation of quantum chemistry is one of the most anticipated applications of quantum computing, the scaling of known upper bounds on the complexity of these algorithms is daunting. Prior work has bounded errors due to Trotterization in terms of the norm of the error operator and analyzed scaling with respect to the number of spin-orbitals. However, we find that these error bounds can be loose by up to sixteen orders of magnitude for some molecules. Furthermore, numerical results for small systems fail to reveal any clear correlation between ground state error and number of spin-orbitals. We instead argue that chemical properties, such as the maximum nuclear charge in a molecule and the filling fraction of orbitals, can be decisive for determining the cost of a quantum simulation. Our analysis motivates several strategies to use classical processing to further reduce the required Trotter step size and to estimate the necessary number of steps, without requiring additional quantum resources. Finally, we demonstrate improved methods for state preparation techniques which are asymptotically superior to proposals in the simulation literature.

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arXiv2013

A variational eigenvalue solver on a quantum processor

Quantum computers promise to efficiently solve important problems that are intractable on a conventional computer. For quantum systems, where the dimension of the problem space grows exponentially, finding the eigenvalues of certain operators is one such intractable problem and remains a fundamental challenge. The quantum phase estimation algorithm can efficiently find the eigenvalue of a given eigenvector but requires fully coherent evolution. We present an alternative approach that greatly reduces the requirements for coherent evolution and we combine this method with a new approach to state preparation based on ansätze and classical optimization. We have implemented the algorithm by combining a small-scale photonic quantum processor with a conventional computer. We experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of this approach with an example from quantum chemistry: calculating the ground state molecular energy for He-H+, to within chemical accuracy. The proposed approach, by drastically reducing the coherence time requirements, enhances the potential of the quantum resources available today and in the near future.

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