Sampling Noise and Optimized Measurement Distribution in Imaginary-Time Quantum Dynamics Simulations
Abstract
Variational quantum dynamics simulations (VQDS) provide a promising route to simulate real- and imaginary-time quantum dynamics on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices using fixed-depth circuits. However, their practical performance is strongly limited by sampling noise arising from a finite number of circuit measurements. In this work, we systematically investigate the impact of sampling noise on VQDS, with a focus on ground-state preparation in one-dimensional Ising spin models using imaginary time evolution. We compare different regularization strategies for stabilizing the equations of motion and show that Tikhonov regularization provides robust performance in noisy imaginary-time evolution. We then benchmark measurement-distribution strategies that allocate shots by minimizing a cost function that characterizes the error in solving the equation of motion. Using noisy circuit simulations, we demonstrate that such optimized shot allocation can significantly improve state fidelity and reduce the total measurement cost by more than a factor of two compared to uniform shot distributions. We observe that the best results are found if a sufficiently large number of measurements is guaranteed for all circuits, suggesting that a finite fraction of shots should be distributed evenly. Our results provide practical guidelines for implementing measurement-efficient variational quantum dynamics and ground-state preparation on near-term quantum hardware.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{zhang2026sampling,
title = {{Sampling Noise and Optimized Measurement Distribution in Imaginary-Time Quantum Dynamics Simulations}},
author = {Feng Zhang and Niladri Gomes and Joshua Aftergood and Thomas Iadecola and Yong-Xin Yao and Peter P. Orth},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = may,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.20378},
eprint = {2605.20378},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20378},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Sampling Noise and Optimized Measurement Distribution in Imaginary-Time Quantum Dynamics Simulations
AU - Feng Zhang
AU - Niladri Gomes
AU - Joshua Aftergood
AU - Thomas Iadecola
AU - Yong-Xin Yao
AU - Peter P. Orth
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/05/19
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.20378
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20378
AB - Variational quantum dynamics simulations (VQDS) provide a promising route to simulate real- and imaginary-time quantum dynamics on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices using fixed-depth circuits. However, their practical performance is strongly limited by sampling noise arising from a finite number of circuit measurements. In this work, we systematically investigate the impact of sampling noise on VQDS, with a focus on ground-state preparation in one-dimensional Ising spin models using imaginary time evolution. We compare different regularization strategies for stabilizing the equations of motion and show that Tikhonov regularization provides robust performance in noisy imaginary-time evolution. We then benchmark measurement-distribution strategies that allocate shots by minimizing a cost function that characterizes the error in solving the equation of motion. Using noisy circuit simulations, we demonstrate that such optimized shot allocation can significantly improve state fidelity and reduce the total measurement cost by more than a factor of two compared to uniform shot distributions. We observe that the best results are found if a sufficiently large number of measurements is guaranteed for all circuits, suggesting that a finite fraction of shots should be distributed evenly. Our results provide practical guidelines for implementing measurement-efficient variational quantum dynamics and ground-state preparation on near-term quantum hardware.
ER -