Synthesizing efficient circuits for Hamiltonian simulation

Abstract

We provide a new approach for compiling quantum simulation circuits that appear in Trotter, qDRIFT and multi-product formulas to Clifford and non-Clifford operations that can reduce the number of non-Clifford operations by a factor of up to 4. The central idea behind our approach is to collect mutually commuting Hamiltonian terms into groups that satisfy one of several symmetries identified in this work which allow an inexpensive simulation of the entire group of terms. We further show that the cost can in some cases be reduced by partially allocating Hamiltonian terms to several groups and provide a polynomial time classical algorithm that can greedily allocate the terms to appropriate groupings. We further specifically discuss these optimizations for the case of fermionic dynamics and provide extensive numerical simulations for qDRIFT of our grouping strategy to 6 and 4-qubit Heisenberg models, LiH, H_2 and observe a factor of 1.8-3.2 reduction in the number of non-Clifford gates. This suggests Trotter-based simulation of chemistry in second quantization may be even more practical than previously believed.