Put and , where . In the ordered basis , the product of the two reflections is
The leading minus sign is a physically irrelevant global phase. The remaining rotation matrix rotates the good-bad plane through , where
Equivalently, one iterate changes the initial angle to .
The operators act on different qubits and therefore commute, so
Since ,
The scalar is a global phase. Thus each factor uses two Hadamard gates and one phase gate, and applying the factors in parallel or sequentially gives an exact quantum circuit of elementary gates.
Each summand of acts on one qubit, while each summand of acts on two. Therefore is a 2-local Hamiltonian. We have
Split into steps of length and use the second-order product formula
For one step, in the stated estimate, so the spectral-norm error is . The error bound for a product of unitary operators makes the total error
It is therefore enough to choose
with also large enough that the small-step estimate applies.
All terms commute. A factor uses a constant-size circuit of two controlled-NOT gates and one phase gate, up to a global phase, so one product-formula step costs gates. The complete Hamiltonian simulation consequently has size