- Open Access
Hamiltonian simulation with explicit formulas for digital-analog quantum computing
Phys. Rev. A 113, 062607 – Published 3 June, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/nzxg-5lbg
Abstract
Digital-analog is a quantum computational paradigm that employs the natural interaction Hamiltonian of a system as the entangling resource, combined with single qubit gates, to implement universal quantum operations. As in the case of its digital gate-based counterpart, designing digital-analog circuits that employ optimal quantum resources often requires an exceedingly large classical computational time. In this work we find a suboptimal solution to this exponentially large problem, showing that it can be solved within polynomial computational time. In particular, we provide an exact solution for the problem of expressing arbitrary two-body Hamiltonians as the sum of local unitary transformations of an arbitrary Ising Hamiltonian, with the total number of required terms being at most quadratic in system size. This allows us to design a digital-analog simulation protocol that avoids employing numerical optimization over a large parameter space at the preprocessing stage, minimizing computational resources and allowing for further scaling.
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
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- As a visual key, we will denote with the vector mark the vectors with size , in contrast to the vectors of size 3, which will be written without it.
- 2-norm or Euclidean norm, which is , . As this is the only vector norm that we employ in this paper, we omit the subindex.
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- As a fun fact, if we wanted to solve this equation with the optimum amount of steps, there is another analytical solution which employs steps if is a power of 2. In this case, we can associate the matrix with the Hadamard matrix, as its definition coincides with Eq. (B8) for all off-diagonal blocks.