Dynamical simulation of periodically driven systems on near term quantum computers

Quantum simulation may be one of the first practical applications to see a quantum advantage. While algorithms for simulating time-independent systems on near-term hardware is a very active area, techniques for simulating time-dependent systems are less developed. Standard iterative Trotterization-based approaches to simulating time-dependent quantum simulation require fine grained time steps resulting in untenably deep circuits. In contrast, we show that if we restrict ourselves to periodically drive “Floquet” systems then near-term quantum simulations can be feasible. Our proposed simulation algorithm, which does not require any form of costly additional optimization procedure, translates the time dependent problem into a time-independent one. This opens the possibility of simulating driven systems using more efficient methods for simulating independent systems. In numerical investigations we study transversally driven versions of the Ising, XX-YY, Heisenberg and Axial Next-Nearest-Neighbour Ising models. We find our proposed approach can outperform the standard Trotter approach by several orders of magnitude.