Optimal fermion-to-qubit mapping via ternary trees with applications to reduced quantum states learning

Abstract

We introduce a fermion-to-qubit mapping defined on ternary trees, where any single Majorana operator on an n-mode fermionic system is mapped to a multi-qubit Pauli operator acting nontrivially on dlog3(2n + 1)e qubits. The mapping has a simple structure and is optimal in the sense that it is impossible to construct Pauli operators in any fermion-to-qubit mapping acting nontrivially on less than log3(2n) qubits on average. We apply it to the problem of learning k-fermion reduced density matrix (RDM), a problem relevant in various quantum simulation applications. We show that one can determine individual elements of all k-fermion RDMs in parallel, to precision ε, by repeating a single quantum circuit for . (2n + 1)kε−2 times. This result is based on a method we develop here that allows one to determine individual elements of all k-qubit RDMs in parallel, to precision ε, by repeating a single quantum circuit for . 3kε−2 times, independent of the system size. This improves over existing schemes for determining qubit RDMs.