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Title: Imaginary Time Propagation on a Quantum Chip

Journal Article · · Physical Review A
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  1. Univ. of Trento (Italy); Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications (Italy)
  2. Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
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We report evolution in imaginary time is a prominent technique for finding the ground state of quantum many-body systems, and the heart of a number of numerical methods that have been used with great success in quantum chemistry, condensed matter, and nuclear physics. We propose an algorithm to implement imaginary time propagation on a quantum computer. Our algorithm is devised in the context of an efficient encoding into an optimized gate, drawing on the underlying characteristics of the quantum device of a unitary operation in an extended Hilbert space. However, we prove that for simple problems it can also be successfully applied to standard digital quantum machines. This work paves the way for porting quantum many-body methods based on imaginary-time propagation to near-term quantum devices, enabling the future quantum simulation of the ground states of a broad class of microscopic systems.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program; USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); University of Trento, Bruno Kessler Foundation (Q@TN)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC52-07NA27344
OSTI ID:
1868165
Report Number(s):
LLNL-JRNL-819649; LLNL-JRNL-827423; 1042126
Journal Information:
Physical Review A, Journal Name: Physical Review A Journal Issue: 2 Vol. 105; ISSN 2469-9926
Publisher:
American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Related Subjects

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
GENERAL PHYSICS
quantum algorithms
quantum computation
quantum simulation