Symmetry enhanced variational quantum imaginary time evolution

TL;DR

This paper introduces symmetry-enhanced parameterized quantum circuits for the variational quantum imaginary time evolution algorithm, improving efficiency and performance by leveraging Hamiltonian symmetries, with successful benchmarking on statistical models.

Contribution

It provides a method to incorporate Hamiltonian symmetries into quantum circuits, reducing complexity and enhancing the effectiveness of VarQITE.

Findings

Symmetry-enhanced circuits outperform standard circuits in experiments.

Incorporating symmetries reduces circuit depth and parameters.

Numerical results validate the efficiency of the proposed approach.

Abstract

The variational quantum imaginary time evolution (VarQITE) algorithm is a near-term method to prepare the ground state and Gibbs state of Hamiltonians. Finding an appropriate parameterization of the quantum circuit is crucial to the success of VarQITE. This work provides guidance for constructing parameterized quantum circuits according to the locality and symmetries of the Hamiltonian. Our approach can be used to implement the unitary and anti-unitary symmetries of a quantum system, which significantly reduces the depth and degree of freedom of the parameterized quantum circuits. To benchmark the proposed parameterized quantum circuits, we carry out VarQITE experiments on statistical models. Numerical results confirm that the symmetry-enhanced circuits outperform the frequently-used parametrized circuits in the literature.