%0 Journal Article %J Phys. Rev. Lett. %D 2020 %T Simulating large quantum circuits on a small quantum computer %A Tianyi Peng %A Aram Harrow %A Maris Ozols %A Xiaodi Wu %X

Limited quantum memory is one of the most important constraints for near-term quantum devices. Understanding whether a small quantum computer can simulate a larger quantum system, or execute an algorithm requiring more qubits than available, is both of theoretical and practical importance. In this Letter, we introduce cluster parameters K and d of a quantum circuit. The tensor network of such a circuit can be decomposed into clusters of size at most d with at most K qubits of inter-cluster quantum communication. Our main result is a simulation scheme of any (K,d)-clustered quantum circuit on a d-qubit machine in time roughly 2O(K). An important application of our result is the simulation of clustered quantum systems---such as large molecules---that can be partitioned into multiple significantly smaller clusters with weak interactions among them. Another potential application is quantum optimization: we demonstrate numerically that variational quantum eigensolvers can still perform well when restricted to clustered circuits, thus making it feasible to study large quantum systems on small quantum devices.

%B Phys. Rev. Lett. %V 125 %8 12/8/2020 %G eng %U https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.00102 %N 150504 %R https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.150504