Near-term quantum computing techniques: Variational quantum algorithms, error mitigation, circuit compilation, benchmarking and classical simulation

Quantum computing is a game-changing technology for global academia,research centers and industries including computational science,mathematics,finance,pharmaceutical,materials science,chemistry and cryptography.Although it has seen a major boost in the last decade,we are still a long way from reaching the maturity of a full-fledged quantum computer.That said,we will be in the noisy-intermediate scale quantum(NISQ)era for a long time,working on dozens or even thousands of qubits quantum computing systems.An outstanding challenge,then,is to come up with an application that can reliably carry out a nontrivial task of interest on the near-term quantum devices with non-negligible quantum noise.To address this challenge,several near-term quantum computing techniques,including variational quantum algorithms,error mitigation,quantum circuit compilation and benchmarking protocols,have been proposed to characterize and mitigate errors,and to implement algorithms with a certain resistance to noise,so as to enhance the capabilities of near-term quantum devices and explore the boundaries of their ability to realize useful applications.Besides,the development of near-term quantum devices is inseparable from the efficient classical sim-ulation,which plays a vital role in quantum algorithm design and verification,error-tolerant verification and other applications.This review will provide a thorough introduction of these near-term quantum computing techniques,report on their progress,and finally discuss the future prospect of these techniques,which we hope will motivate researchers to undertake additional studies in this field.

Speedup in classical simulation of Gaussian boson sampling

Gaussian boson sampling is an alternative model for demonstrating quantum computational supremacy,where squeezed states are injected into every input mode, instead of applying single photons as in the case of standard boson sampling. Here by analyzing numerically the computational costs, we establish a lower bound for achieving quantum computational supremacy for a class of Gaussian bosonsampling problems. Specifically, we propose a more efficient method for calculating the transition probabilities, leading to a significant reduction of the simulation costs. Particularly, our numerical results indicate that one can simulate up to 18 photons for Gaussian boson sampling at the output subspace on a normal laptop, 20 photons on a commercial workstation with 256 cores, and about 30 photons for supercomputers. These numbers are significantly smaller than those in standard boson sampling, suggesting that Gaussian boson sampling could be experimentally-friendly for demonstrating quantum computational supremacy.

Fragmentation dynamics of electron-impact double ionization of helium

We study the double ionization dynamics of a helium atom impacted by electrons with full-dimensional classical trajectory Monte Carlo simulation. The excess energy is chosen to cover a wide range of values from 5 e V to 1 ke V for comparative study. At the lowest excess energy, i.e., close to the double-ionization threshold, it is found that the projectile momentum is totally transferred to the recoil-ion while the residual energy is randomly partitioned among the three outgoing electrons, which are then most probably emitted with an equilateral triangle configuration. Our results agree well with experiments as compared with early quantum-mechanical calculation as well as classical simulation based on a two-dimensional Bohr's model. Furthermore, by mapping the final momentum vectors event by event into a Dalitz plot,we unambiguously demonstrate that the ergodicity has been reached and thus confirm a long-term scenario conceived by Wannier. The time scale for such few-body thermalization, from the initial nonequilibrium state to the final microcanonical distribution, is only about 100 attoseconds. Finally, we predict that, with the increase of the excess energy, the dominant emission configuration undergoes a transition from equilateral triangle to T-shape and finally to a co-linear mode. The associated signatures of such configuration transition in the electron–ion joint momentum spectrum and triple-electron angular distribution are also demonstrated.

Cooling Rate Dependence of Structural Order and Energy Landscape in Zr_(55)Cu_(35)Al_(10) Glass

Classical molecular dynamics simulation has been widely used to study the rapid cooling process of preparing amorphous alloys.However,the simulated cooling rate is several orders of magnitude higher than the experimental cooling rate.In this paper,Zr_(55)Cu_(35)Al_(10)alloy was taken as an example.It is found that adding isothermal annealing at a temperature slightly lower than Tand prolonging isothermal annealing time could effectively reduce the cooling rate.The glassy sample prepared in this way demonstrates significant energetic stability and well-developed short-range and medium-range order.