Imaginary Time Propagation on a Quantum Chip

Understand

Evolution in imaginary time is a prominent technique for finding the ground state of quantum many-body systems, and the heart of a number of numerical methods that have been used with great success in quantum chemistry, condensed matter and nuclear physics.

• We propose an algorithm to implement imaginary time propagation on a quantum computer.
• Our algorithm is devised in the context of an efficient encoding into an optimized gate, drawing on the underlying characteristics of the quantum device, of a unitary operation in an extended Hilbert space.
• However, we proved that for simple problems it can be successfully applied to standard digital quantum machines.