Many computationally hard problems can be encoded in quantum Hamiltonians. The solution to these problems is given by the ground states of these Hamiltonians. A state-of-the-art algorithm for finding the ground state of a Hamiltonian is the so-called Quantum Imaginary Time Evolution (QITE) which approximates imaginary time evolution by a unitary evolution that can be implemented in quantum hardware. In this paper, we review the original algorithm together with a comprehensive computer program, as well as, the variational version of it.
@article{arxiv.2510.02015,
title = {Understanding Quantum Imaginary Time Evolution and its Variational form},
author = {Andreu Anglés-Castillo and Luca Ion and Tanmoy Pandit and Rafael Gomez-Lurbe and Rodrigo Martínez and Miguel Angel Garcia-March},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.02015},
year = {2025}
}