• Open Access

Quantum natural gradient generalized to noisy and nonunitary circuits

Bálint Koczor and Simon C. Benjamin
Phys. Rev. A 106, 062416 – Published 14 December 2022

Abstract

Variational quantum algorithms are promising tools whose efficacy depends on their optimization method. For noise-free unitary circuits, the quantum generalization of natural gradient descent has been introduced and shown to be equivalent to imaginary time evolution: the approach is effective due to a metric tensor reconciling the classical parameter space to the device's Hilbert space. Here we generalize quantum natural gradient to consider arbitrary quantum states (both mixed and pure) via completely positive maps; thus our circuits can incorporate both imperfect unitary gates and fundamentally nonunitary operations such as measurements. We employ the quantum Fisher information (QFI) as the core metric in the space of density operators. A modification of the error suppression by derangements (ESD) and virtual distillation (VD) techniques enables an accurate and experimentally efficient approximation of the QFI via the Hilbert-Schmidt metric tensor using prior results on the dominant eigenvector of noisy quantum states. Our rigorous proof also establishes the fundamental observation that the geometry of typical noisy quantum states is (approximately) identical in either the Hilbert-Schmidt metric or as characterized by the QFI. In numerical simulations of noisy quantum circuits we demonstrate the practicality of our approach and confirm it can significantly outperform other variational techniques.

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  • Received 10 February 2020
  • Revised 4 August 2021
  • Accepted 5 October 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.106.062416

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Quantum Information, Science & Technology

Authors & Affiliations

Bálint Koczor1,2,* and Simon C. Benjamin1,2,†

  • 1Department of Materials, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PH, United Kingdom
  • 2Quantum Motion, 9 Sterling Way, London N7 9HJ, United Kingdom

  • *balint.koczor@materials.ox.ac.uk
  • simon.benjamin@materials.ox.ac.uk

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Issue

Vol. 106, Iss. 6 — December 2022

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