  Hamiltonian simulation represents an important module in a large class of
quantum algorithms and simulations such as quantum machine learning, quantum
linear algebra methods, and modeling for physics, material science and
chemistry. One of the most prominent methods for realizing the time-evolution
unitary is via the Trotter-Suzuki decomposition. However, there is a large
class of possible decompositions for the infinitesimal time-evolution operator
as the order in which the Hamiltonian terms are implemented is arbitrary. We
introduce a novel perspective for generating a low-depth Trotter-Suzuki
decomposition assuming the standard Clifford+RZ gate set by adapting ideas from
quantum error correction. We map a given Trotter-Suzuki decomposition to a
constrained path on a graph which we deem the Pauli Frame Graph (PFG). Each
node of the PFG represents the set of possible Hamiltonian terms currently
available to be applied, Clifford operations represent a move from one node to
another, and so the graph distance represents the gate cost of implementing the
decomposition. The problem of finding the optimal decomposition is then
equivalent to solving a problem similar to the traveling salesman. Though this
is an NP-hard problem, we demonstrate the simplest heuristic, greedy search,
and compare the resulting two-qubit gate count and circuit depth to more
standard methods for a large class of scientifically relevant Hamiltonians,
both fermionic and bosonic, found in chemical, vibrational and condensed matter
problems which naturally scale. We find in nearly every case we study, the
resulting depth and two-qubit gate counts are less than those provided by
standard methods, by as much as an order of magnitude. We also find the method
is efficient and amenable to parallelization, making the method scalable for
problems of real interest.
