Optimised fermion-qubit encodings for quantum simulation with reduced circuit depth

Abstract Simulation of fermionic Hamiltonians with gate-based quantum computers requires the selection of an encoding from fermionic operators to quantum gates, the most widely used being the Jordan-Wigner transform. Many alternative encodings exist, with quantum circuits and simulation results being sensitive to choice of encoding, device connectivity and Hamiltonian characteristics. Non-stochastic optimisation of the ternary tree (TT) class of encodings to date has targeted either the device or Hamiltonian. We develop a deterministic method which optimises TT encodings without changing the underlying tree structure. This enables reduction in Pauli-weight without ancillae or additional swap-gate overhead. We demonstrate this method for a variety of encodings, including those which are derived from the qubit connectivity graph of a quantum computer. Numerical results for a suite of standard encoding methods applied to water in the STO-3G basis indicate that our method reduces qDRIFT circuit depths on average by 24.7 % and 26.5 % for untranspiled and transpiled circuits respectively.