T50: Applications on Noisy Quantum Hardware II

Thu. March 7, 12:30 p.m. – 12:42 p.m. CST

200H

Simulating the dynamics of quantum many-body systems is one of the most promising applications of digital quantum computers. A large obstacle to realizing useful dynamics simulations on current quantum computers is the presence of errors during quantum operations such as two-qubit gates. In this work, we analyze how gate errors affect the measurements of observables in quantum circuits that represent the dynamics of a Hamiltonian under a Trotter decomposition. We illustrate with heuristic arguments and numerical evidence that the effect of gate errors is significantly less than one would naively expect when measuring local observables and time evolving by a thermalizing energy-conserving dynamics. Moreover, we show that a two-qubit gate error probability that scales linearly with gate angle, which has been approximately demonstrated on a Quantinuum quantum computer, is particularly helpful in reaching accurate long-time dynamics simulations.