Digital quantum simulation of electron-phonon systems requires truncating infinite phonon levels into N basis states and then encoding them with qubit computational basis. Unary encoding and binary encoding are the two most representative encoding schemes, which demand O(N) and O(logN) qubits as well as O(N) and O(NlogN) quantum gates, respectively. In this paper, we propose a variational basis state encoding algorithm that reduces the scaling of the number of qubits and quantum gates to both O(1) for systems obeying the area law of entanglement entropy. The cost for the scaling reduction is a constant amount of additional measurement. The accuracy and efficiency of the approach are verified by both numerical simulation and realistic quantum hardware experiments. In particular, we find using one or two qubits for each phonon mode is sufficient to produce quantitatively correct results across weak and strong coupling regimes. Our approach paves the way for practical quantum simulation of electron-phonon systems on both near-term hardware and error-corrected quantum computers.
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