Recompilation-enhanced simulation of electron-phonon dynamics on IBM Quantum computers

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the simulation of electron-phonon dynamics on IBM quantum hardware, utilizing approximate circuit recompilation to mitigate noise and achieve results comparable to exact methods, advancing near-term quantum simulation capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces the use of approximate circuit recompilation to improve the accuracy of quantum simulations of electron-phonon systems on noisy hardware.

Findings

Successful simulation of electron-phonon dynamics on IBM quantum computers.

Approximate circuit recompilation reduces noise effects significantly.

Results are comparable to exact diagonalisation despite hardware noise.

Abstract

Simulating quantum systems is believed to be one of the first applications for which quantum computers may demonstrate a useful advantage. For many problems in physics, we are interested in studying the evolution of the electron-phonon Hamiltonian, for which efficient digital quantum computing schemes exist. Yet to date, no accurate simulation of this system has been produced on real quantum hardware. In this work, we consider the absolute resource cost for gate-based quantum simulation of small electron-phonon systems as dictated by the number of Trotter steps and bosonic energy levels necessary for the convergence of dynamics. We then apply these findings to perform experiments on IBM quantum hardware for both weak and strong electron-phonon coupling. Despite significant device noise, through the use of approximate circuit recompilation we obtain electron-phonon dynamics on current quantum computers comparable to exact diagonalisation. Our results represent a significant step in utilising near term quantum computers for simulation of quantum dynamics and highlight the novelty of approximate circuit recompilation as a tool for reducing noise.