The Optimization Landscape of Hybrid Quantum-Classical Algorithms: from Quantum Control to NISQ Applications

Understand

This review investigates the landscapes of prevalent hybrid quantum-classical optimization algorithms in many rapidly developing quantum technologies, where the objective function is either computed by a natural quantum system or a quantum ansatz that is engineered, but the optimizer is classical.

• In any particular case, the nature of the underlying control landscape is fundamentally important for systematic optimization of the objective.
• In early studies on the optimal control of few-body dynamics, the optimizer could take full control of the quantum systems to be manipulated whose Hilbert space dimension is relatively small.
• Stepping into the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, the experimentally growing computational power of the ansatz expressed as quantum hardware may bring quantum advantage over classical computers, but the classical optimizer is often limited by the available control resources.