A quantum solution for efficient use of symmetries in the simulation of many-body systems

A many-body Hamiltonian can be block-diagonalized by expressing it in terms of symmetry-adapted basis states. Finding the group orbit representatives of these basis states and their corresponding symmetries is currently a memory/computational bottleneck on classical computers during exact diagonalization. We apply Grover’s search in the form of a minimization procedure to solve this problem. Our quantum solution provides an exponential reduction in memory, and a quadratic speedup in time over classical methods. We discuss explicitly the full circuit implementation of Grover minimization as applied to this problem, finding that the oracle only scales as polylog in the size of the group, which acts as the search space. Further, we design an error mitigation scheme that, with no additional qubits, reduces the impact of bit-flip errors on the computation, with the magnitude of mitigation directly correlated with the error rate, improving the utility of the algorithm in the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum era.