Measuring the Loschmidt Amplitude for Finite-Energy Properties of the Fermi-Hubbard Model on an Ion-Trap Quantum Computer

Abstract

Calculating the equilibrium properties of condensed-matter systems is one of the promising applications of near-term quantum computing. Recently, hybrid quantum-classical time-series algorithms have been proposed to efficiently extract these properties from a measurement of the Loschmidt amplitude $⟨\psi |e^{-i\hat{H}t}|\psi ⟩$ from initial states $|\psi ⟩$ and a time evolution under the Hamiltonian $\hat{H}$ up to short times $t$. In this work, we study the operation of this algorithm on a present-day quantum computer. Specifically, we measure the Loschmidt amplitude for the Fermi-Hubbard model on a $16$-site ladder geometry (32 orbitals) on the Quantinuum H2-1 trapped-ion device. We assess the effect of noise on the Loschmidt amplitude and implement algorithm-specific error-mitigation techniques. By using a thus-motivated error model, we numerically analyze the influence of noise on the full operation of the quantum-classical algorithm by measuring expectation values of local observables at finite energies. Finally, we estimate the resources needed for scaling up the algorithm.