Novel Trotter formulas for digital quantum simulation

Understand

Quantum simulation promises to address many challenges in fields ranging from quantum chemistry to material science, and high-energy physics, and could be implemented in noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.

• A challenge in building good digital quantum simulators is the fidelity of the engineered dynamics given a finite set of elementary operations.
• Here we present a framework for optimizing the order of operations based on a geometric picture, thus abstracting from the operation details and achieving computational efficiency.
• Based on this geometric framework, we provide two alternative second-order Trotter expansions, one with optimal fidelity at a short time scale, and the second robust at a long time scale.