Learning quantum symmetries with interactive quantum-classical variational algorithms
This work addresses the challenge of extracting physical insights from quantum systems for researchers in quantum computing and physics, though it is incremental as it builds on existing variational and interactive methods.
The authors tackled the problem of learning symmetries of unknown quantum states using a hybrid quantum-classical variational algorithm, achieving efficient scaling with qubit size in simulations on states like cluster and Rydberg ground states.
A symmetry of a state $\vert ψ\rangle$ is a unitary operator of which $\vert ψ\rangle$ is an eigenvector. When $\vert ψ\rangle$ is an unknown state supplied by a black-box oracle, the state's symmetries provide key physical insight into the quantum system; symmetries also boost many crucial quantum learning techniques. In this paper, we develop a variational hybrid quantum-classical learning scheme to systematically probe for symmetries of $\vert ψ\rangle$ with no a priori assumptions about the state. This procedure can be used to learn various symmetries at the same time. In order to avoid re-learning already known symmetries, we introduce an interactive protocol with a classical deep neural net. The classical net thereby regularizes against repetitive findings and allows our algorithm to terminate empirically with all possible symmetries found. Our scheme can be implemented efficiently on average with non-local SWAP gates; we also give a less efficient algorithm with only local operations, which may be more appropriate for current noisy quantum devices. We simulate our algorithm on representative families of states, including cluster states and ground states of Rydberg and Ising Hamiltonians. We also find that the numerical query complexity scales well with qubit size.