Error Bounds for Variational Quantum Time Evolution

Abstract: Variational quantum time evolution allows us to simulate the time dynamics of quantum systems with near-term compatible quantum circuits. Due to the variational nature of this method the accuracy of the simulation is a priori unknown. We derive global phase agnostic error bounds for the state simulation accuracy with variational quantum time evolution that improve the tightness of fidelity estimates over existing error bounds. These analysis tools are practically crucial for assessing the quality of the simulation and making informed choices about simulation hyper-parameters. The efficient, a posteriori evaluation of the bounds can be tightly integrated with the variational time simulation and, hence, results in a minor resource overhead which is governed by the system's energy variance. The performance of the novel error bounds is demonstrated on numerical examples.