Noise-aware variational eigensolvers: a dissipative route for lattice gauge theories

TL;DR

This paper introduces a noise-aware variational eigensolver combining dissipative and unitary operations for efficient ground-state preparation of the $ ext{Z}_2$ lattice gauge theory, achieving high precision with fewer parameters and layers, suitable for near-term quantum devices.

Contribution

It presents a novel dissipative variational ansatz that reduces circuit depth and improves accuracy in simulating lattice gauge theories, especially under realistic noise conditions.

Findings

Achieves >99% energy precision with few parameters.

Reduces variational layers compared to unitary ansatz.

Predicts accurate critical exponents without size-dependent layers.

Abstract

We propose a novel variational ansatz for the ground-state preparation of the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ lattice gauge theory (LGT) in quantum simulators. It combines dissipative and unitary operations in a completely deterministic scheme with a circuit depth that does not scale with the size of the considered lattice. We find that, with very few variational parameters, the ansatz can achieve $>\!99\%$ precision in energy in both the confined and deconfined phase of the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ LGT. We benchmark our proposal against the unitary Hamiltonian variational ansatz showing a reduction in the required number of variational layers to achieve a target precision. After performing a finite-size scaling analysis, we show that our dissipative variational ansatz can predict accurate critical exponents without requiring a number of layers that scale with the system size, which is the standard situation for unitary ans\"{a}tze. Furthermore, we investigate the performance of this variational eigensolver subject to circuit-level noise, determining variational error thresholds that fix the error rate below which it would be beneficial to increase the number of layers. In light of these quantities and for typical gate errors $p$ in current quantum processors, we provide a detailed assessment of the prospects of our scheme to explore the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ LGT on near-term devices.