A critical limitation of quantum imaginary time evolution-like algorithms in the noisy quantum hardware

The variational quantum imaginary time evolution algorithm is efficient in finding the ground state of a quantum Hamiltonian. This algorithm involves solving a system of linear equations in a classical computer and the solution is then used to propagate a quantum wavefunction. Here, we show that owing to the noisy nature of current quantum processors, such a quantum algorithm or the family of quantum algorithms that require classical computation of inverting a matrix with high condition number will require single- and two-qubit gates with very low error probability. Failure to meet such conditions will result in erroneous quantum data propagation even for a relatively small quantum circuit ansatz. Specifically, we find the upper bounds on how the quantum algorithmic error scales with the probability of errors in quantum hardware. Our work challenges the mainstream notion of hybrid quantum-classical quantum algorithms being able to perform under noisy environments while we show such algorithms in fact require very low error quantum gates to get reliable results.