Expanding Hardware-Efficiently Manipulable Hilbert Space via Hamiltonian Embedding

The realization of quantum computing is fundamentally based on the precise manipulation of Hilbert spaces of underlying quantum devices. The conventional wisdom relies on circuit synthesis techniques to decompose sophisticated operations on Hilbert space to a set of universal elementary gates. Although providing a universal solution, this hardware-agnostic strategy typically leads to deep quantum circuits for interesting quantum algorithms, which makes them infeasible for implementation on near-term quantum devices.

In this paper, we propose a technique named Hamiltonian embedding that simulates a desired Hamiltonian evolution by embedding it into the evolution of a large and structured quantum system, which, however, allows more efficient manipulation via hardware-native operations. We conduct a systematic study of this embedding technique and demonstrate a significant computational resource save for implementing prominent quantum applications. As a result, we can experimentally realize quantum walks on complicated graphs (e.g., binary trees, glued-tree graphs), quantum spatial search, and the simulation of real-space Schrödinger equations on trapped-ion and neutral-atom platforms today. Given the fundamental role of Hamiltonian evolution in quantum algorithm design, our technique significantly expands the horizon of implementable quantum advantage in the NISQ era.