Adiabatic quantum imaginary time evolution

Understand

We introduce an adiabatic state preparation protocol which implements quantum imaginary time evolution under the Hamiltonian of the system.

• Unlike the original quantum imaginary time evolution algorithm, adiabatic quantum imaginary time evolution does not require quantum state tomography during its runtime, and unlike standard adiabatic state preparation, the final Hamiltonian is not the system Hamiltonian.
• Instead, the algorithm obtains the adiabatic Hamiltonian by integrating a classical differential equation that ensures that one follows the imaginary time evolution state trajectory.
• We introduce some heuristics that allow this protocol to be implemented on quantum architectures with limited resources.