Long-time simulations for fixed input states on quantum hardware

Abstract

Publicly accessible quantum computers open the exciting possibility of experimental dynamical quantum simulations. While rapidly improving, current devices have short coherence times, restricting the viable circuit depth. Despite these limitations, we demonstrate long-time, high fidelity simulations on current hardware. Specifically, we simulate an XY-model spin chain on Rigetti and IBM quantum computers, maintaining a fidelity over 0.9 for 150 times longer than is possible using the iterated Trotter method. Our simulations use an algorithm we call fixed state Variational Fast Forwarding (fsVFF). Recent work has shown an approximate diagonalization of a short time evolution unitary allows a fixed-depth simulation. fsVFF substantially reduces the required resources by only diagonalizing the energy subspace spanned by the initial state, rather than over the total Hilbert space. We further demonstrate the viability of fsVFF through large numerical simulations, and provide an analysis of the noise resilience and scaling of simulation errors.