ffsim: Faster simulation of fermionic quantum circuits

TL;DR

ffsim is an open-source library that accelerates fermionic quantum circuit simulations by leveraging system symmetries, enabling efficient simulations of large-scale fermionic systems.

Contribution

It introduces a faster, symmetry-exploiting simulation tool for fermionic quantum circuits, improving upon existing libraries like FQE.

Findings

ffsim reduces memory usage and simulation time significantly.

It supports variational ansatzes and Hamiltonian evolution methods.

Demonstrated capability to simulate up to 64 qubits.

Abstract

We present ffsim, an open-source software library for fast simulation of fermionic quantum circuits. ffsim exploits conservation of particle number and the z component of spin, symmetries present in a wide range of fermionic systems, to dramatically reduce memory usage and simulation time compared to general-purpose quantum circuit simulators. Compared to FQE, a library with similar functionality, ffsim differs in software design and is faster on a representative set of simulation benchmarks. Beyond state vector evolution by basic fermionic gates, ffsim offers a number of additional features including variational ansatzes, Hamiltonian time evolution via Trotter-Suzuki product formulas, efficient sampling of Slater determinants, seamless integration with Qiskit and PySCF, and comprehensive documentation. We demonstrate ffsim's capabilities on scientific applications involving quantum circuits of up to 64 qubits.