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Understanding Quantum Imaginary Time Evolution and its Variational form
Andreu Anglés-Castillo, Luca Ion, Tanmoy Pandit, Rafael Gomez-Lurbe, Rodrigo Martínez, Miguel Angel Garcia-March·October 2, 2025
Quantum Physics
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Abstract
Many computationally hard problems can be encoded in quantum Hamiltonians. The solution to these problems is given by the ground states of these Hamiltonians. A state-of-the-art algorithm for finding the ground state of a Hamiltonian is the so-called Quantum Imaginary Time Evolution (QITE) which approximates imaginary time evolution by a unitary evolution that can be implemented in quantum hardware. In this paper, we review the original algorithm together with a comprehensive computer program, as well as, the variational version of it.