Quantum Simulation on Noisy Superconducting Quantum Computers

TL;DR

This paper introduces quantum simulation on noisy superconducting quantum computers, covering foundational concepts, an example simulation of a disordered system, and techniques for error mitigation to improve performance.

Contribution

It provides an accessible introduction to quantum simulation, demonstrates a specific example with a disordered system, and discusses error mitigation techniques for noisy quantum hardware.

Findings

Error mitigation techniques significantly improve simulation accuracy

Demonstrated quantum simulation of a disordered tight-binding model

Provided open-source code for educational and research use

Abstract

Quantum simulation is a potentially powerful application of quantum computing, holding the promise to be able to emulate interesting quantum systems beyond the reach of classical computing methods. Despite such promising applications, and the increase in active research, there is little introductory literature or demonstrations of the topic at a graduate or undergraduate student level. This artificially raises the barrier to entry into the field which already has a limited workforce, both in academia and industry. Here we present an introduction to simulating quantum systems, starting with a chosen Hamiltonian, overviewing state preparation and evolution, and discussing measurement methods. We provide an example simulation by measuring the state dynamics of a tight-binding model with disorder by time evolution using the Suzuki-Trotter decomposition. Furthermore, error mitigation and noise reduction are essential to executing quantum algorithms on currently available noisy quantum computers. We discuss and demonstrate various error mitigation and circuit optimization techniques that significantly improve performance. All source code is freely available, and we encourage the reader to build upon it.