Simulating open quantum many-body systems using optimised circuits in digital quantum simulation

TL;DR

This paper develops optimized quantum circuits for simulating open quantum many-body systems, demonstrating high-precision results on noiseless simulators and qualitative trends on noisy IBM devices, highlighting the potential for quantum advantage.

Contribution

It introduces a method to minimize errors in Trotterized MSSE for open systems and applies it to both noiseless simulators and real quantum hardware, advancing quantum simulation capabilities.

Findings

High-precision simulation of nonequilibrium critical phenomena on noiseless simulators.

Qualitative agreement with critical behavior observed on IBM quantum devices.

Noise reduction is essential for achieving quantitative accuracy and quantum advantage.

Abstract

Digital quantum computers are potentially an ideal platform for simulating open quantum many-body systems beyond the digital classical computers. Many studies have focused on obtaining the ground state by simulating time dynamics or variational approaches of closed quantum systems. However, dynamics of open quantum systems has not been given much attention with a reason being their non-unitary dynamics not natural to simulate on a set of unitary gate operations in quantum computing. Here we study prototypical models in open quantum systems with Trotterisations for the modified stochastic Schr{\"o}dinger equation (MSSE). Minimising the leading error in MSSE enables to optimise the quantum circuits, and we run the optimised circuits with the noiseless \textit{quantum assembly language (QASM) simulator} and the noisy IBM Quantum devices. The \textit{QASM simulator} enables to study the reachable system size that is comparable to the limits of classical computers. The results show that the nonequilibrium critical phenomena in open quantum systems are successfully obtained with high precision. Furthermore, we run the algorithm on the IBM Quantum devices, showing that the current machine is challenging, to give quantitatively accurate time dynamics due to the noise. Despite errors, the results by IBM devices qualitatively follow the trend of critical behaviour and include a possibility to demonstrate quantum advantage when the noise is reduced. We discuss how much noise should be reduced for a certain fidelity using the noise model, which will be crucial to demonstrate quantum advantage from future quantum devices.