Simulating time evolution with fully optimized single-qubit gates on parametrized quantum circuits

We propose a method to sequentially optimize arbitrary single-qubit gates in parametrized quantum circuits for simulating real- and imaginary-time evolution. The method utilizes full degrees of freedom of single-qubit gates and therefore can potentially obtain better performance. Specifically, it simultaneously optimizes both the axis and the angle of a single-qubit gate, while the known methods either optimize the angle with the axis fixed, or vice versa. It generalizes the known methods and utilizes sinusoidal cost functions parametrized by the axis and angle of rotation. Furthermore, we demonstrate how it can be extended to optimize a set of parametrized two-qubit gates with excitation-conservation constraints, which includes the HOP and the reconfigurable beam-splitter gates. We perform numerical experiments showing the power of the proposed method to find ground states of typical Hamiltonians with quantum imaginary-time evolution using parametrized quantum circuits. In addition, we show the method can be applied to real-time evolution and discuss the tradeoff between its simulation accuracy and hardware efficiency.