Quantum annealing and the variational quantum eigensolver are two promising quantum algorithms to find the ground state of complicated Hamiltonians on near-term quantum devices. However, it is necessary to limit the evolution time or the circuit depth as much as possible since otherwise decoherence will degrade the computation. Even when this is done, there always exists a non-negligible estimation error in the ground state energy. Here we propose a scalable extrapolation approach to mitigate this error. With an appropriate regression, we can significantly improve the estimation accuracy for quantum annealing and variational quantum eigensolver for fixed quantum resources. The inference is achieved by extrapolating the annealing time to infinity or extrapolating the variance to zero. The only additional overhead is an increase in the number of measurements by a constant factor. We verified the validity of our method with the transverse-field Ising model. The method is robust to noise, and the techniques are applicable to other physics problems. Analytic derivations for the quadratic convergence feature of the residual energy in quantum annealing and the linear convergence feature of energy variance are given.
Identifying phases of matter is a complicated process, especially in quantum theory, where the complexity of the ground state appears to rise exponentially with system size. Traditionally, physicists have been responsible for identifying suitable order parameters for the identification of the various phases. The entanglement of quantum many-body systems exhibits rich structures and can be determined over the phase diagram. The intriguing question of the relationship between entanglement and quantum phase transition has recently been addressed. As a method that works directly on the entanglement structure, disentanglement can provide factual information on the entanglement structure. In this work, we follow a radically different approach to identifying quantum phases: we utilize reinforcement learning (RL) approaches to develop an efficient variational quantum circuit that disentangles the ground-state of Ising spin chain systems. We show that the specified quantum circuit structure of the tested models correlates to a phase transition in the behaviour of the entanglement. We show a similar universal quantum circuit structure for ground states in the same phase to reduce entanglement entropy. This study sheds light on characterizing quantum phases with the types of entanglement structures of the ground states.
The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) transforms a simple many-qubit wavefunction into one which encodes the solution to a difficult classical optimization problem. It does this by optimizing the schedule according to which two unitary operators are alternately applied to the qubits. In this paper, this procedure is modified by updating the operators themselves to include local fields, using information from the measured wavefunction at the end of one iteration step to improve the operators at later steps. It is shown by numerical simulation on MAXCUT problems that this decreases the runtime of QAOA very substantially. This improvement appears to increase with the problem size. Our method requires essentially the same number of quantum gates per optimization step as the standard QAOA. Application of this modified algorithm should bring closer the time to quantum advantage for optimization problems.
Quantum imaginary time evolution is a powerful algorithm to prepare ground states and thermal states on near-term quantum devices. However, algorithmic errors induced by Trotterization and local approximation severely hinder its performance. Here we propose a deep-reinforcement-learning-based method to steer the evolution and mitigate these errors. In our scheme, the well-trained agent can find the subtle evolution path where most algorithmic errors cancel out, enhancing the recovering fidelity significantly. We verified the validity of the method with the transverse-field Ising model and graph maximum cut problem. Numerical calculations and experiments on a nuclear magnetic resonance quantum computer illustrated the efficacy. The philosophy of our method, eliminating errors with errors, sheds new light on error reduction on near-term quantum devices.
Quantum state tomography (QST) is a crucial ingredient for almost all aspects of experimental quantum information processing. As an analog of the imaging technique in the quantum settings, QST is born to be a data science problem, where machine learning techniques, noticeably neural networks, have been applied extensively. In this work, we build an integrated all-optical setup for neural network QST, based on an all-optical neural network (AONN). Our AONN is equipped with built-in nonlinear activation function, which is based on electromagnetically induced transparency. Experiment results demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the all-optical setup, indicating that AONN can mitigate the state-preparation-and-measurement error and predict the phase parameter in the quantum state accurately. Given that optical setups are highly desired for future quantum networks, our all-optical setup of integrated AONN-QST may shed light on replenishing the all-optical quantum network with the last brick.
Quantum autoencoder is an efficient variational quantum algorithm for quantum data compression. However, previous quantum autoencoders fail to compress and recover high-rank mixed states. In this work, we discuss the fundamental properties and limitations of the standard quantum autoencoder model in more depth, and provide an information-theoretic solution to its recovering fidelity. Based on this understanding, we present a noise-assisted quantum autoencoder algorithm to go beyond the limitations, our model can achieve high recovering fidelity for general input states. Appropriate noise channels are used to make the input mixedness and output mixedness consistent, the noise setup is determined by measurement results of the trash system. Compared with the original quantum autoencoder model, the measurement information is fully used in our algorithm. In addition to the circuit model, we design a (noise-assisted) adiabatic model of quantum autoencoder that can be implemented on quantum annealers. We verified the validity of our methods through compressing the thermal states of transverse field Ising model and Werner states. For pure state ensemble compression, we also introduce a projected quantum autoencoder algorithm.
Variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is promising to show quantum advantage on near-term noisy-intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers. One central problem of VQE is the effect of noise, especially the physical noise on realistic quantum computers. We study systematically the effect of noise for the VQE algorithm, by performing numerical simulations with various local noise models, including the amplitude damping, dephasing, and depolarizing noise. We show that the ground state energy will deviate from the exact value as the noise probability increase and normally noise will accumulate as the circuit depth increase. We build a noise model to capture the noise in a real quantum computer. Our numerical simulation is consistent with the quantum experiment results on IBM Quantum computers through Cloud. Our work sheds new light on the practical research of noisy VQE. The deep understanding of the noise effect of VQE may help to develop quantum error mitigation techniques on near team quantum computers.
We propose a method to speed up the quantum adiabatic algorithm using catalysis by many-body delocalization. This is applied to random-field antiferromagnetic Ising spin models. The algorithm is catalyzed in such a way that the evolution approximates a Heisenberg model in the middle of its course, and the model is in a delocalized phase. We show numerically that we can speed up the standard algorithm for finding the ground state of the random-field Ising model using this idea. We also demonstrate that the speedup is due to gap amplification, even though the underlying model is not frustration-free. The crossover to speedup occurs at roughly the value of the interaction which is known to be the critical one for the delocalization transition. We also calculate the participation ratio and entanglement entropy as a function of time: their time dependencies indicate that the system is exploring more states and that they are more entangled than when there is no catalyst. Together, all these pieces of evidence demonstrate that the speedup is related to delocalization. Even though only relatively small systems can be investigated, the evidence suggests that the scaling of the method with system size is favorable. Our method is illustrated by experimental results from a small online IBM quantum computer, showing how to verify the method in future as such machines improve. The cost of the catalytic method compared to the standard algorithm is only a constant factor.
Simulating quantum circuits with classical computers requires resources growing exponentially in terms of system size. Real quantum computer with noise, however, may be simulated polynomially with various methods considering different noise models. In this work, we simulate random quantum circuits in 1D with Matrix Product Density Operators (MPDO), for different noise models such as dephasing, depolarizing, and amplitude damping. We show that the method based on Matrix Product States (MPS) fails to approximate the noisy output quantum states for any of the noise models considered, while the MPDO method approximates them well. Compared with the method of Matrix Product Operators (MPO), the MPDO method reflects a clear physical picture of noise (with inner indices taking care of the noise simulation) and quantum entanglement (with bond indices taking care of two-qubit gate simulation). Consequently, in case of weak system noise, the resource cost of MPDO will be significantly less than that of the MPO due to a relatively small inner dimension needed for the simulation. In case of strong system noise, a relatively small bond dimension may be sufficient to simulate the noisy circuits, indicating a regime that the noise is large enough for an `easy classical simulation. Moreover, we propose a more effective tensor updates scheme with optimal truncations for both the inner and the bond dimensions, performed after each layer of the circuit, which enjoys a canonical form of the MPDO for improving simulation accuracy. With truncated inner dimension to a maximum value $kappa$ and bond dimension to a maximum value $chi$, the cost of our simulation scales as $sim NDkappa^3chi^3$, for an $N$-qubit circuit with depth $D$.
Quantifying entanglement for multipartite quantum state is a crucial task in many aspects of quantum information theory. Among all the entanglement measures, relative entropy of entanglement $E_{R}$ is an outstanding quantity due to its clear geometric meaning, easy compatibility with different system sizes, and various applications in many other related quantity calculations. Lower bounds of $E_R$ were previously found based on distance to the set of positive partial transpose states. We propose a method to calculate upper bounds of $E_R$ based on active learning, a subfield in machine learning, to generate an approximation of the set of separable states. We apply our method to calculate $E_R$ for composite systems of various sizes, and compare with the previous known lower bounds, obtaining promising results. Our method adds a reliable tool for entanglement measure calculation and deepens our understanding for the structure of separable states.
