Approximate Quantum Compiling for Quantum Simulation: A Tensor Network Based Approach

We introduce AQCtensor , a novel algorithm to produce short-depth quantum circuits from Matrix Product States (MPS). Our approach is specifically tailored to the preparation of quantum states generated from the time evolution of quantum many-body Hamiltonians. This tailored approach has two clear advantages over previous algorithms that were designed to map a generic MPS to a quantum circuit. First, we optimise all parameters of a parametric circuit at once using Approximate Quantum Compiling (AQC)—this is to be contrasted with other approaches based on locally optimizing a subset of circuit parameters and “sweeping” across the system. We introduce an optimisation scheme to avoid the so-called “orthogonality catastrophe”—i.e., the fact that the fidelity of two arbitrary quantum states decays exponentially with the number of qubits—that would otherwise render a global optimisation of the circuit impractical. Second, the depth of our parametric circuit is constant in the number of qubits for a fixed simulation time and fixed error tolerance. This is to be contrasted with the linear circuit Ansatz used in generic algorithms whose depth scales linearly in the number of qubits. For simulation problems on 100 qubits, we show that AQCtensor thus achieves at least an order of magnitude reduction in the depth of the resulting optimized circuit, as compared with the best generic MPS to quantum circuit algorithms. We demonstrate our approach on simulation problems on Heisenberg-like Hamiltonians on up to 100 qubits and find optimized quantum circuits that have signficantly reduced depth as compared with standard Trotterized circuits.