Acceleration of probabilistic imaginary-time evolution method combined with quantum amplitude amplification

Abstract: A probabilistic imaginary-time evolution (PITE) method was proposed as a nonvariational method to obtain a ground state on a quantum computer. In this formalism, the success probability of obtaining all imaginary-time evolution operators acting on the initial state decreases as the imaginary time proceeds. To alleviate the undesirable nature, we propose quantum circuits for PITE combined with the quantum amplitude amplification (QAA) method. We reduce the circuit depth in the combined circuit with QAA by introducing a pre-amplification operator. We successfully demonstrated that the combination of PITE and QAA works efficiently and reported a case in which the quantum acceleration is achieved. Additionally, we have found that by optimizing a parameter of PITE, we can reduce the number of QAA operations and that deterministic imaginary-time evolution (deterministic ITE) can be achieved which avoids the probabilistic nature of PITE. We applied the deterministic ITE procedure to multiple imaginary-time steps and discussed the computational cost for the circuits. Finally, as an example, we demonstrate the numerical results of the PITE circuit combined with QAA in the first- and second-quantized Hamiltonians.