TY - JOUR T1 - Exponential improvement in precision for simulating sparse Hamiltonians JF - Proceedings of the 46th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2014) Y1 - 2014 A1 - Dominic W. Berry A1 - Andrew M. Childs A1 - Richard Cleve A1 - Robin Kothari A1 - Rolando D. Somma AB - We provide a quantum algorithm for simulating the dynamics of sparse Hamiltonians with complexity sublogarithmic in the inverse error, an exponential improvement over previous methods. Specifically, we show that a $d$-sparse Hamiltonian $H$ acting on $n$ qubits can be simulated for time $t$ with precision $\epsilon$ using $O\big(\tau \frac{\log(\tau/\epsilon)}{\log\log(\tau/\epsilon)}\big)$ queries and $O\big(\tau \frac{\log^2(\tau/\epsilon)}{\log\log(\tau/\epsilon)}n\big)$ additional 2-qubit gates, where $\tau = d^2 \|{H}\|_{\max} t$. Unlike previous approaches based on product formulas, the query complexity is independent of the number of qubits acted on, and for time-varying Hamiltonians, the gate complexity is logarithmic in the norm of the derivative of the Hamiltonian. Our algorithm is based on a significantly improved simulation of the continuous- and fractional-query models using discrete quantum queries, showing that the former models are not much more powerful than the discrete model even for very small error. We also simplify the analysis of this conversion, avoiding the need for a complex fault correction procedure. Our simplification relies on a new form of "oblivious amplitude amplification" that can be applied even though the reflection about the input state is unavailable. Finally, we prove new lower bounds showing that our algorithms are optimal as a function of the error. U4 - 283-292 SN - 978-1-4503-2710-7 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.1414v2 J1 - Proceedings of the 46th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2014) U5 - 10.1145/2591796.2591854 ER -