Adaptive Trotterization for Time-Dependent Hamiltonian Quantum Dynamics Using Piecewise Conservation Laws

Abstract

Digital quantum simulation relies on Trotterization to discretize time evolution into elementary quantum gates. On current quantum processors with notable gate imperfections, there is a critical trade-off between improved accuracy for finer time steps, and increased error rate on account of the larger circuit depth. We present an adaptive Trotterization algorithm to cope with time dependent Hamiltonians, where we propose a concept of to estimate errors in the time evolution between two (nearby) points in time; these allow us to bound the errors accumulated over the full simulation period. They reduce to standard conservation laws in the case of time independent Hamiltonians, for which we first developed an adaptive Trotterization scheme [H. Zhao , Making Trotterization adaptive and energy-self-correcting for NISQ devices and beyond, .]. We validate the algorithm for a time dependent quantum spin chain, demonstrating that it can outperform the conventional Trotter algorithm with a fixed step size at a controlled error. Published by the American Physical Society 2024