Variational Optimization of the Time Evolution Operator in Correlated Systems

Simulating the time evolution of quantum systems is a classically challenging and often intractable task due to the exponential scaling of its constituent operators. This scaling makes it a promising application for quantum computation, especially for correlated systems. Constructing an approximate time evolution operator can be done using the Trotter-Suzuki decomposition with an error that scales at most polynomially in the target simulation time and can be decreased at the cost of longer circuit depth. Variational approaches to classically optimize this approximation have shown significant improvement in accuracy for large quantum systems in both gate count and accuracy by several orders of magnitude. However, it is unclear if a similar improvement can be obtained for strongly correlated systems. We extend this variational approach to two example systems with strong correlations: a one-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard chain and an extended Fermi-Hubbard chain. The encoding between qubits and fermionic modes in these systems is generally nonlocal and so we propose an encoding scheme for these Hamiltonians with minimal overall operator distance between nearest neighbor connected qubits. We demonstrate that this variational method grants a similarly strong improvement in both gate count and accuracy and examine the performance of these optimized gate sequences using realistic noise models to estimate their performance on noisy quantum hardware. Finally, we discuss an approach to combine the optimized nonlocal gates of small chains to larger systems without the need for additional computational resources.