No Arabic abstract
We numerically emulate noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices and determine the minimal hardware requirements for two-site hybrid quantum-classical dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). We develop a circuit recompilation algorithm which significantly reduces the number of quantum gates of the DMFT algorithm and find that the quantum-classical algorithm converges if the two-qubit gate fidelities are larger than 99%. The converged results agree with the exact solution within 10%, and perfect agreement within noise-induced error margins can be obtained for two-qubit gate fidelities exceeding 99.9%. By comparison, the quantum-classical algorithm without circuit recompilation requires a two-qubit gate fidelity of at least 99.999% to achieve perfect agreement with the exact solution. We thus find quantum-classical DMFT calculations can be run on the next generation of NISQ devices if combined with the recompilation techniques developed in this work.
Extensive quantum error correction is necessary in order to scale quantum hardware to the regime of practical applications. As a result, a significant amount of decoding hardware is necessary to process the colossal amount of data required to constantly detect and correct errors occurring over the millions of physical qubits driving the computation. The implementation of a recent highly optimized version of Shors algorithm to factor a 2,048-bits integer would require more 7 TBit/s of bandwidth for the sole purpose of quantum error correction and up to 20,000 decoding units. To reduce the decoding hardware requirements, we propose a fault-tolerant quantum computing architecture based on surface codes with a cheap hard-decision decoder, the lazy decoder, combined with a sophisticated decoding unit that takes care of complex error configurations. Our design drops the decoding hardware requirements by several orders of magnitude assuming that good enough qubits are provided. Given qubits and quantum gates with a physical error rate $p=10^{-4}$, the lazy decoder drops both the bandwidth requirements and the number of decoding units by a factor 50x. Provided very good qubits with error rate $p=10^{-5}$, we obtain a 1,500x reduction in bandwidth and decoding hardware thanks to the lazy decoder. Finally, the lazy decoder can be used as a decoder accelerator. Our simulations show a 10x speed-up of the Union-Find decoder and a 50x speed-up of the Minimum Weight Perfect Matching decoder.
In this work, the global white-noise model is proved from first principles. The adherence of NISQ hardware to the global white-noise model is used to perform noise mitigation using Classical White-noise Extrapolation (CLAWE).
Within the context of hybrid quantum-classical optimization, gradient descent based optimizers typically require the evaluation of expectation values with respect to the outcome of parameterized quantum circuits. In this work, we explore the consequences of the prior observation that estimation of these quantities on quantum hardware results in a form of stochastic gradient descent optimization. We formalize this notion, which allows us to show that in many relevant cases, including VQE, QAOA and certain quantum classifiers, estimating expectation values with $k$ measurement outcomes results in optimization algorithms whose convergence properties can be rigorously well understood, for any value of $k$. In fact, even using single measurement outcomes for the estimation of expectation values is sufficient. Moreover, in many settings the required gradients can be expressed as linear combinations of expectation values -- originating, e.g., from a sum over local terms of a Hamiltonian, a parameter shift rule, or a sum over data-set instances -- and we show that in these cases $k$-shot expectation value estimation can be combined with sampling over terms of the linear combination, to obtain doubly stochastic gradient descent optimizers. For all algorithms we prove convergence guarantees, providing a framework for the derivation of rigorous optimization results in the context of near-term quantum devices. Additionally, we explore numerically these methods on benchmark VQE, QAOA and quantum-enhanced machine learning tasks and show that treating the stochastic settings as hyper-parameters allows for state-of-the-art results with significantly fewer circuit executions and measurements.
Deep learning has been shown to be able to recognize data patterns better than humans in specific circumstances or contexts. In parallel, quantum computing has demonstrated to be able to output complex wave functions with a few number of gate operations, which could generate distributions that are hard for a classical computer to produce. Here we propose a hybrid quantum-classical convolutional neural network (QCCNN), inspired by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but adapted to quantum computing to enhance the feature mapping process. QCCNN is friendly to currently noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers, in terms of both number of qubits as well as circuits depths, while retaining important features of classical CNN, such as nonlinearity and scalability. We also present a framework to automatically compute the gradients of hybrid quantum-classical loss functions which could be directly applied to other hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. We demonstrate the potential of this architecture by applying it to a Tetris dataset, and show that QCCNN can accomplish classification tasks with learning accuracy surpassing that of classical CNN.
Constrained Hamiltonian description of the classical limit is utilized in order to derive consistent dynamical equations for hybrid quantum-classical systems. Starting with a compound quantum system in the Hamiltonian formulation conditions for classical behavior are imposed on one of its subsystems and the corresponding hybrid dynamical equations are derived. The presented formalism suggests that the hybrid systems have properties that are not exhausted by those of quantum and classical systems.