Compressing Many-Body Fermion Operators under Unitary Constraints

Reducing the Runtime of Fault-Tolerant Quantum Simulations in Chemistry through Symmetry-Compressed Double Factorization

Quantum phase estimation based on qubitization is the state-of-the-art fault-tolerant quantum algorithm for computing ground-state energies in chemical applications. In this context, the 1-norm of the Hamiltonian plays a fundamental role in determining the total number of required iterations and also the overall computational cost. In this work, we introduce the symmetry-compressed double factorization (SCDF) approach, which combines a CDF of the Hamiltonian with the symmetry shift technique, significantly reducing the 1-norm value. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated numerically by considering various benchmark systems, including the FeMoco molecule, cytochrome P450, and hydrogen chains of different sizes. To compare the efficiency of SCDF to other methods in absolute terms, we estimate Toffoli gate requirements, which dominate the execution time on fault-tolerant quantum computers. For the systems considered here, SCDF leads to a sizable reduction of the Toffoli gate count in comparison to other variants of DF or even tensor hypercontraction, which is usually regarded as the most efficient approach for qubitization.

Many-Body Excited States with a Contracted Quantum Eigensolver

Calculating ground and excited states is an exciting prospect for near-term quantum computing applications, and accurate and efficient algorithms are needed to assess viable directions. We develop an excited-state approach based on the contracted quantum eigensolver (ES-CQE), which iteratively attempts to find a solution to a contraction of the Schrödinger equation projected onto a subspace and does not require a priori information on the system. We focus on the anti-Hermitian portion of the equation, leading to a two-body unitary ansatz. We investigate the role of symmetries, initial states, constraints, and overall performance within the context of the model strongly correlated rectangular H4 system. We show that the ES-CQE achieves near-exact accuracy across the majority of states, covering regions of strong and weak electron correlation, while also elucidating challenging instances for two-body unitary ansatz.

Capabilities and Limits of the Unitary Coupled-cluster Approach with Generalized Two-body Cluster Operators

Unitary cluster expansions of the electronic wavefunction have recently gained much interest because of their use in conjunction with quantum algorithms. In this contribution, we investigate some aspects of an ansatz using generalized two-body excitations operators, which has been considered in some recent works on quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry. Our numerical results show that in particular two-body operators with effective particle-hole excitation level of one in connection with the usual particle-hole double excitation operators lead to a very accurate yet compact representation of the wavefunction. Generalized two-body operators with effective excitation rank zero have a considerably less pronounced effect. We compare to standard and unitary coupled-cluster expansions and show that the above mentioned approach matches or even surpasses the accuracy of expansions with three-body particle-hole excitations, in particular at the onset of strong correlation. A downside of the approach is that it is rather difficult to rigorously converge it to its variational minimum.

Accelerated Convergence of Contracted Quantum Eigensolvers through a Quasi-Second-Order, Locally Parameterized Optimization

A contracted quantum eigensolver (CQE) finds a solution to the many-electron Schrödinger equation by solving its integration (or contraction) to the two-electron space—a contracted Schrödinger equation (CSE)—on a quantum computer. When applied to the anti-Hermitian part of the CSE (ACSE), the CQE iterations optimize the wave function, with respect to a general product ansatz of two-body exponential unitary transformations that can exactly solve the Schrödinger equation. In this work, we accelerate the convergence of the CQE and its wave function ansatz via tools from classical optimization theory. By treating the CQE algorithm as an optimization in a local parameter space, we can apply quasi-second-order optimization techniques, such as quasi-Newton approaches or nonlinear conjugate gradient approaches. Practically, these algorithms result in superlinear convergence of the wave function to a solution of the ACSE. Convergence acceleration is important because it can both minimize the accumulation of noise on near-term intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers and achieve highly accurate solutions on future fault-tolerant quantum devices. We demonstrate the algorithm, as well as some heuristic implementations relevant for cost-reduction considerations, comparisons with other common methods such as variational quantum eigensolvers, and a Fermionic-encoding-free form of the CQE.