We study the problem of simulating the time evolution of a lattice Hamiltonian, where the qubits are laid out on a lattice and the Hamiltonian only includes geometrically local interactions (i.e., a qubit may only interact with qubits in its vicinity). This class of Hamiltonians is very general and encompasses all physically reasonable Hamiltonians. Our algorithm simulates the time evolution of such a Hamiltonian on n qubits for time T up to error ϵ using O(nTpolylog(nT/ϵ)) gates with depth O(Tpolylog(nT/ϵ)). Our algorithm is the first simulation algorithm that achieves gate cost quasilinear in nT and polylogarithmic in 1/ϵ. Our algorithm also readily generalizes to time-dependent Hamiltonians and yields an algorithm with similar gate count for any piecewise slowly varying time-dependent bounded local Hamiltonian.

We also prove a matching lower bound on the gate count of such a simulation, showing that any quantum algorithm that can simulate a piecewise constant bounded local Hamiltonian in one dimension to constant error requires Ω~(nT) gates in the worst case. The lower bound holds even if we only require the output state to be correct on local measurements. To our best knowledge, this is the first nontrivial lower bound on the gate complexity of the simulation problem. Our algorithm is based on a decomposition of the time-evolution unitary into a product of small unitaries using Lieb-Robinson bounds. In the appendix, we prove a Lieb-Robinson bound tailored to Hamiltonians with small commutators between local terms, giving zero Lieb-Robinson velocity in the limit of commuting Hamiltonians. This improves the performance of our algorithm when the Hamiltonian is close to commuting.