Phase Estimation with Compressed Controlled Time Evolution

Abstract

Many optimally scaling quantum simulation algorithms employ controlled time evolution of the Hamiltonian, which is typically the major bottleneck for their efficient implementation. This work establishes a compression protocol for encoding the controlled time evolution operator of translationally invariant, local Hamiltonians into a quantum circuit. It achieves a near-optimal in time $t$ scaling for circuit depth $\mathcal{O}(t \text{ polylog}(t N/ε))$, while reducing the control overhead from a multiplicative to an additive factor. We report that this compression protocol enables the implementation of Iterative Quantum Phase Estimation with as few as 414 CNOT gates for a frustrated quantum spin system on a 6$\times$6 triangular lattice and delivers ground state energy errors below 1% (with $\pm$ 1.5% variation, calculated with a hardware noise aware pipeline) on a 4$\times$4 triangular lattice using the noisy emulator of the Quantinuum H2 trapped ion device.