An efficient quantum algorithm for the time evolution of parameterized circuits

TL;DR

This paper presents p-VQD, a new hybrid quantum algorithm that efficiently simulates real-time quantum dynamics by globally optimizing all parameters simultaneously, scaling linearly with the number of parameters, and outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces p-VQD, a novel global variational algorithm for quantum dynamics that improves efficiency and scalability over existing local or quadratic-scaling methods.

Findings

p-VQD scales linearly with the number of parameters.

It outperforms existing global optimization algorithms in numerical experiments.

The method extends the scope of variational quantum simulation techniques.

Abstract

We introduce a novel hybrid algorithm to simulate the real-time evolution of quantum systems using parameterized quantum circuits. The method, named "projected - Variational Quantum Dynamics" (p-VQD) realizes an iterative, global projection of the exact time evolution onto the parameterized manifold. In the small time-step limit, this is equivalent to the McLachlan's variational principle. Our approach is efficient in the sense that it exhibits an optimal linear scaling with the total number of variational parameters. Furthermore, it is global in the sense that it uses the variational principle to optimize all parameters at once. The global nature of our approach then significantly extends the scope of existing efficient variational methods, that instead typically rely on the iterative optimization of a restricted subset of variational parameters. Through numerical experiments, we also show that our approach is particularly advantageous over existing global optimization algorithms based on the time-dependent variational principle that, due to a demanding quadratic scaling with parameter numbers, are unsuitable for large parameterized quantum circuits.