State preparation with parallel-sequential circuits

Abstract: We introduce parallel-sequential (PS) circuits, a family of quantum circuit layouts that interpolate between brickwall and sequential circuits, which introduces control parameters governing the ratio of over the amount of entanglement and the maximum correlation distance they can express. We provide numerical evidence that PS circuits can efficiently prepare many-body ground states in one dimension. On noisy devices, characterized through both idling errors and two-qubit gate errors, we show that in a wide parameter regime, PS circuits outperform brickwall, sequential, and log-depth circuits from [Malz, Styliaris, Wei, Cirac, PRL 132, 040404 (2024)]. Additionally, we demonstrate that properly chosen noisy random PS circuits suppress error proliferation and, when employed as a variational ansatz, exhibit superior trainability.