Efficient Fully-Coherent Hamiltonian Simulation

Hamiltonian simulation is a fundamental problem at the heart of quantum computation, and the associated simulation algorithms are useful building blocks for designing larger quantum algorithms. In order to be successfully concatenated into a larger quantum algorithm, a Hamiltonian simulation algorithm must succeed with arbitrarily high success probability 1-δ while only requiring a single copy of the initial state, a property which we call fully-coherent. Although optimal Hamiltonian simulation has been achieved by quantum signal processing (QSP), with query complexity linear in time t and logarithmic in inverse error ln(1/ε), the corresponding algorithm is not fully-coherent as it only succeeds with probability close to 1/4. While this simulation algorithm can be made fully-coherent by employing amplitude amplification at the expense of appending a ln(1/δ) multiplicative factor to the query complexity, here we develop a new fully-coherent Hamiltonian simulation algorithm that achieves a query complexity additive in ln(1/δ): Θ(|H| |t| + ln(1/ε) + ln(1/δ)). We accomplish this by compressing the spectrum of the Hamiltonian with an affine transformation, and applying to it a QSP polynomial that approximates the complex exponential only over the range of the compressed spectrum. We further numerically analyze the complexity of this algorithm and demonstrate its application to the simulation of the Heisenberg model in constant and time-dependent external magnetic fields. We believe that this efficient fully-coherent Hamiltonian simulation algorithm can serve as a useful subroutine in quantum algorithms where maintaining coherence is paramount.