Quantum simulation
Disse Sied is noch nich översett. Se kiekt de engelsche Originalversion an.
Yukio Kawashima (May 30, 2024)
Download the pdf of the original lecture. Note that some code snippets might become deprecated since these are static images.
Approximate QPU time to run this experiment is 7 seconds.
(This notebook is mostly taken from a now-deprecated tutorial notebook for Qiskit Algorithms.)
1. Introduction
As a real time evolution technique, Trotterization consists in the successive application of a quantum gate or gates, chosen to approximate the time evolution of a system for a time slice. Following from the Schrödinger equation, the time evolution of a system initially in the state takes the form:
where is the time-independent Hamiltonian governing the system. We consider a Hamiltonian that can be written as a weighted sum of Pauli terms , with representing a tensor product of Pauli terms acting on qubits. In particular, these Pauli terms might commute with one another, or they might not. Given a state at time , how do we obtain the system's state at a later time using a quantum computer? The exponential of an operator can be most easily understood through its Taylor series:
Some very basic exponentials, like can be implemented easily on quantum computers using a compact set of quantum gates. Most Hamiltonians of interest will not have just a single term, but will instead have many terms. Note what happens if :
When and commute, we have the familiar case (which is also true for numbers, and variables and below):
But when operators do not commute, terms cannot be rearranged in the Taylor series to simplify in this way. Thus, expressing complicated Hamiltonians in quantum gates is a challenge.
One solution is to consider very small time , such that the first-order term in the Taylor expansion dominates. Under that assumption: