Quantum (Oct 2021)

The Fermionic Quantum Emulator

  • Nicholas C. Rubin,
  • Klaas Gunst,
  • Alec White,
  • Leon Freitag,
  • Kyle Throssell,
  • Garnet Kin-Lic Chan,
  • Ryan Babbush,
  • Toru Shiozaki

DOI
https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2021-10-27-568
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 5
p. 568

Abstract

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The fermionic quantum emulator (FQE) is a collection of protocols for emulating quantum dynamics of fermions efficiently taking advantage of common symmetries present in chemical, materials, and condensed-matter systems. The library is fully integrated with the OpenFermion software package and serves as the simulation backend. The FQE reduces memory footprint by exploiting number and spin symmetry along with custom evolution routines for sparse and dense Hamiltonians, allowing us to study significantly larger quantum circuits at modest computational cost when compared against qubit state vector simulators. This release paper outlines the technical details of the simulation methods and key advantages.