https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-023-04801-9
Regular Article
Information scrambling and entanglement in quantum approximate optimization algorithm circuits
1
Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences, 100193, Beijing, China
2
State Key Laboratory of Low Dimensional Quantum Physics, Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, 100084, Beijing, China
3
Frontier Science Center for Quantum Information, 100184, Beijing, China
Received:
23
August
2023
Accepted:
16
December
2023
Published online:
3
January
2024
Variational quantum algorithms, which consist of optimal parameterized quantum circuits, are promising for demonstrating quantum advantages in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. Apart from classical computational resources, different kinds of quantum resources have their contributions in the process of computing, such as information scrambling and entanglement. Characterizing the relation between complexity of specific problems and quantum resources consumed by solving these problems is helpful for us to understand the structure of VQAs in the context of quantum information processing. In this work, we focus on the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA), which aims to solve combinatorial optimization problems. We study information scrambling and entanglement in QAOA circuits, respectively, and discover that for a harder problem, more quantum resource is required for the QAOA circuit to obtain the solution in most of the cases. We note that in the future, our results can be used to benchmark complexity of quantum many-body problems by information scrambling or entanglement accumulation in the computing process.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
