ABSTRACT

Dominic W. Berry, Graeme Ahokas, Richard Cleve, and Barry C. Sanders

Abstract Arguably one of the most important applications of quantum computers is the simulation of quantum systems. In the case where the Hamiltonian consists of a sum of interaction terms between small subsystems, the simulation is thought to be exponentially more efficient than classical simulation. More generally, evolution under suitably specified sparse Hamiltonians may be efficiently simulated. In recent work we have shown that the complexity of simulating evolution under a Hamiltonian is very close to linear in the evolution time. In addition, we have shown that in the general case of a sparse Hamiltonian the complexity grows slowly with respect to the number of qubits. In this chapter we review these results.