Modular Parity Quantum Approximate Optimization

Abstract

The parity transformation encodes spin models in the low-energy subspace of a larger Hilbert-space with constraints on a planar lattice. Applying the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), the constraints can either be enforced explicitly, by energy penalties, or implicitly, by restricting the dynamics to the low-energy subspace via the driver Hamiltonian. While the explicit approach allows for parallelization with a system-size-independent circuit depth, the implicit approach shows better QAOA performance. Here we combine the two approaches in order to improve the QAOA performance while keeping the circuit parallelizable. In particular, we introduce a modular parallelization method that partitions the circuit into clusters of subcircuits with fixed maximal circuit depth, relevant for scaling up to large system sizes.