Constant-Depth Circuits for Dynamic Simulations of Materials on Quantum Computers

Understand

Dynamic simulation of materials is a promising application for near-term quantum computers.

• Current algorithms for Hamiltonian simulation, however, produce circuits that grow in depth with increasing simulation time, limiting feasible simulations to short-time dynamics.
• Here, we present a method for generating circuits that are constant in depth with increasing simulation time for a subset of one-dimensional materials Hamiltonians, thereby enabling simulations out to arbitrarily long times.
• Furthermore, by removing the effective limit on the number of feasibly simulatable time-steps, the constant-depth circuits enable Trotter error to be made negligibly small by allowing simulations to be broken into arbitrarily many time-steps.