Benchmarking Hamiltonian Simulation via Circuit Mirroring*

In the context of quantum simulation, the linear combination of unitaries (LCU) approach is an efficient way to encode and apply Hamiltonians, which in turn serve as key subcomponents needed for ground state preparation and time evolution algorithms. Circuit mirroring is a technique that allows for the construction of scalable, efficiently verifiable benchmarks from arbitrary classes of circuits with successful demonstrations on random and periodic circuits. We combine subcircuits from an LCU encoding of the H₂ molecular Hamiltonian with circuit mirroring to develop an application-inspired benchmark. We show that circuit mirroring is a general framework that enables benchmarking quantum device performance on application-specific circuits and compare this performance to existing benchmarks based on random circuits on an IBM Q device.