No Arabic abstract
Some problems in physics can be handled only after a suitable textit{ansatz }solution has been guessed. Such method is therefore resilient to generalization, resulting of limited scope. The coherent transport by adiabatic passage of a quantum state through an array of semiconductor quantum dots provides a par excellence example of such approach, where it is necessary to introduce its so called counter-intuitive control gate ansatz pulse sequence. Instead, deep reinforcement learning technique has proven to be able to solve very complex sequential decision-making problems involving competition between short-term and long-term rewards, despite a lack of prior knowledge. We show that in the above problem deep reinforcement learning discovers control sequences outperforming the textit{ansatz} counter-intuitive sequence. Even more interesting, it discovers novel strategies when realistic disturbances affect the ideal system, with better speed and fidelity when energy detuning between the ground states of quantum dots or dephasing are added to the master equation, also mitigating the effects of losses. This method enables online update of realistic systems as the policy convergence is boosted by exploiting the prior knowledge when available. Deep reinforcement learning proves effective to control dynamics of quantum states, and more generally it applies whenever an ansatz solution is unknown or insufficient to effectively treat the problem.
The architecture of circuital quantum computers requires computing layers devoted to compiling high-level quantum algorithms into lower-level circuits of quantum gates. The general problem of quantum compiling is to approximate any unitary transformation that describes the quantum computation, as a sequence of elements selected from a finite base of universal quantum gates. The existence of an approximating sequence of one qubit quantum gates is guaranteed by the Solovay-Kitaev theorem, which implies sub-optimal algorithms to establish it explicitly. Since a unitary transformation may require significantly different gate sequences, depending on the base considered, such a problem is of great complexity and does not admit an efficient approximating algorithm. Therefore, traditional approaches are time-consuming tasks, unsuitable to be employed during quantum computation. We exploit the deep reinforcement learning method as an alternative strategy, which has a significantly different trade-off between search time and exploitation time. Deep reinforcement learning allows creating single-qubit operations in real time, after an arbitrary long training period during which a strategy for creating sequences to approximate unitary operators is built. The deep reinforcement learning based compiling method allows for fast computation times, which could in principle be exploited for real-time quantum compiling.
Finding the ground state of a quantum mechanical system can be formulated as an optimal control problem. In this formulation, the drift of the optimally controlled process is chosen to match the distribution of paths in the Feynman--Kac (FK) representation of the solution of the imaginary time Schrodinger equation. This provides a variational principle that can be used for reinforcement learning of a neural representation of the drift. Our approach is a drop-in replacement for path integral Monte Carlo, learning an optimal importance sampler for the FK trajectories. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach to several problems of one-, two-, and many-particle physics.
Combining reinforcement learning (RL) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, we propose a machine-learning approach (RL$^ddag$) to automatically unravel chemical reaction mechanisms. In RL$^ddag$, locating the transition state of a chemical reaction is formulated as a game, where a virtual player is trained to shoot simulation trajectories connecting the reactant and product. The player utilizes two functions, one for value estimation and the other for policy making, to iteratively improve the chance of winning this game. We can directly interpret the reaction mechanism according to the value function. Meanwhile, the policy function enables efficient sampling of the transition paths, which can be further used to analyze the reaction dynamics and kinetics. Through multiple experiments, we show that RL{ddag} can be trained tabula rasa hence allows us to reveal chemical reaction mechanisms with minimal subjective biases.
We consider the optimal approximation of certain quantum states of a harmonic oscillator with the superposition of a finite number of coherent states in phase space placed either on an ellipse or on a certain lattice. These scenarios are currently experimentally feasible. The parameters of the ellipse and the lattice and the coefficients of the constituent coherent states are optimized numerically, via a genetic algorithm, in order to obtain the best approximation. It is found that for certain quantum states the obtained approximation is better than the ones known from the literature thus far.
Recent advances in quantum computing have drawn considerable attention to building realistic application for and using quantum computers. However, designing a suitable quantum circuit architecture requires expert knowledge. For example, it is non-trivial to design a quantum gate sequence for generating a particular quantum state with as fewer gates as possible. We propose a quantum architecture search framework with the power of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to address this challenge. In the proposed framework, the DRL agent can only access the Pauli-$X$, $Y$, $Z$ expectation values and a predefined set of quantum operations for learning the target quantum state, and is optimized by the advantage actor-critic (A2C) and proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithms. We demonstrate a successful generation of quantum gate sequences for multi-qubit GHZ states without encoding any knowledge of quantum physics in the agent. The design of our framework is rather general and can be employed with other DRL architectures or optimization methods to study gate synthesis and compilation for many quantum states.