Fan Yang

Imaginary time evolution is a powerful tool applied in quantum physics, while existing classical algorithms for simulating imaginary time evolution suffer high computational complexity as the quantum systems become larger and more complex. In this work, we propose a probabilistic algorithm for implementing imaginary time evolution based on non-unitary quantum circuit. We demonstrate the feasibility of this method by solving the ground state energy of several quantum many-body systems, including H2, LiH molecules and the quantum Ising chain. Moreover, we perform experiments on superconducting and trapped ion cloud platforms respectively to find the ground state energy of H2 and its most stable molecular structure. We also analyze the successful probability of the algorithm, which is a polynomial of the output error and introduce an approach to increase the success probability by rearranging the terms of Hamiltonian.

Quantum phase transitions are usually classified into discrete universality classes that typically only depend on symmetries and spatial dimensionalities. In this Letter, we demonstrate an opportunity to continuously vary the critical exponents or universalities by tuning experimental parameters in a given physical system. Particularly, we show that critical exponents in long-range spin systems simulated in ion traps can be easily tuned with laser detuning. We suggest that such experiments also effectively simulate some aspects of critical phenomena in conventional spin systems but in artificial non-integer spatial dimensions.