Treespilation: Architecture- and State-Optimised Fermion-to-Qubit Mappings

TL;DR

This paper introduces 'treespilation', a novel Fermion-to-qubit mapping technique that significantly reduces CNOT gate counts in quantum simulations of chemical systems, enhancing efficiency on various quantum hardware.

Contribution

The authors develop and demonstrate 'treespilation', a tree-based mapping method that optimizes Fermion-to-qubit encoding, reducing CNOT gates and improving VQE protocol efficiency.

Findings

Up to 74% reduction in CNOT gates for full connectivity.

Significant CNOT reduction on limited connectivity devices like IBM Eagle and Google Sycamore.

Improved CNOT and parameter efficiency in QEB- and qubit-ADAPT-VQE.

Abstract

Quantum computers hold great promise for efficiently simulating Fermionic systems, benefiting fields like quantum chemistry and materials science. To achieve this, algorithms typically begin by choosing a Fermion-to-qubit mapping to encode the Fermioinc problem in the qubits of a quantum computer. In this work, we introduce "treespilation," a technique for efficiently mapping Fermionic systems using a large family of favourable tree-based mappings previously introduced by some of the authors. We use this technique to minimise the number of CNOT gates required to simulate chemical groundstates found numerically using the ADAPT-VQE algorithm. We observe significant reductions, up to $74\%$, in CNOT counts on full connectivity and for limited qubit connectivity-type devices such as IBM Eagle and Google Sycamore, we observe similar reductions in CNOT counts. In many instances, the reductions achieved on these limited connectivity devices even surpass the initial full connectivity CNOT count. Additionally, we find our method improves the CNOT and parameter efficiency of QEB- and qubit-ADAPT-VQE, which are, to our knowledge, the most CNOT-efficient VQE protocols for molecular state preparation.