Abstract
The Fermi-Hubbard model is of fundamental importance in condensed-matter physics, yet is extremely challenging to solve numerically. Finding the ground state of the Hubbard model using variational methods has been predicted to be one of the first applications of near-term quantum computers. Here we carry out a detailed analysis and optimization of the complexity of variational quantum algorithms for finding the ground state of the Hubbard model, including costs associated with mapping to a real-world hardware platform. The depth complexities we find are substantially lower than previous work. We performed extensive numerical experiments for systems with up to 12 sites. The results suggest that the variational ansätze we used—an efficient variant of the Hamiltonian variational ansatz and a generalization thereof—will be able to find the ground state of the Hubbard model with high fidelity in relatively low quantum circuit depths. Our experiments include the effect of realistic measurements and depolarizing noise. If our numerical results on small lattice sizes are representative of the somewhat larger lattices accessible to near-term quantum hardware, they suggest that optimizing over quantum circuits with a gate depth less than a thousand could be sufficient to solve instances of the Hubbard model beyond the capacity of classical exact diagonalization.
15 More- Received 21 February 2020
- Accepted 20 October 2020
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.102.235122
©2020 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
synopsis
Gaining a Quantum Advantage Sooner than Expected
Published 10 December 2020
For an important quantum many-body problem, a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm could outperform purely classical approaches using surprisingly few quantum resources.
See more in Physics