Lossy Compression for Schrödinger-style Quantum Simulations

Simulating quantum circuits on classical hardware is a powerful and necessary tool for developing and testing quantum algorithms and hardware as well as evaluating claims of quantum supremacy in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum NISQ regime. Schrödinger-style simulations are limited by the exponential growth of the number of state amplitudes which need to be stored. In this work, we apply scalar and vector quantization to Schrödinger-style quantum circuit simulations as lossy compression schemes to reduce the number of bits needed to simulate quantum circuits. Using quantization, we can maintain simulation fidelities >0.99 when simulating the Quantum Fourier Transform, while using only 7 significand bits in a floating-point number to characterize the real and imaginary components of each amplitude. Furthermore, using vector quantization, we propose a method to bound the number of bits/amplitude needed to store state vectors in a simulation of a circuit that achieves a desired fidelity, and show that for a 6 qubit simulation of the Quantum Fourier Transform, 16 bits/amplitude is sufficient to maintain fidelity >0.9 at 10⁴ depth.