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arXiv:1907.03358 · The Journal of Chemical Physics

Measurement optimization in the variational quantum eigensolver using a minimum clique cover

Vladyslav Verteletskyi, Tzu-Ching Yen, Artur F. Izmaylov

Published Mar 27, 2020• 269 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Solving the electronic structure problem using the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) technique involves the measurement of the Hamiltonian expectation value. The current hardware can perform only projective single-qubit measurements, and thus, the Hamiltonian expectation value is obtained by measuring parts of the Hamiltonian rather than the full Hamiltonian. This restriction makes the measurement process inefficient because the number of terms in the Hamiltonian grows as O(N4) with the size of the system, N. To optimize the VQE measurement, one can try to group as many Hamiltonian terms as possible for their simultaneous measurement. Single-qubit measurements allow one to group only the terms commuting within the corresponding single-qubit subspaces or qubit-wise commuting. We found that the qubit-wise commutativity between the Hamiltonian terms can be expressed as a graph and the problem of the optimal grouping is equivalent to finding a minimum clique cover (MCC) for the Hamiltonian graph. The MCC problem is NP-hard, but there exist several polynomial heuristic algorithms to solve it approximately. Several of these heuristics were tested in this work for a set of molecular electronic Hamiltonians. On average, grouping qubit-wise commuting terms reduced the number of operators to measure three times less compared to the total number of terms in the considered Hamiltonians.

DOI
10.1063/1.5141458

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Solving the electronic structure problem using the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) technique involves the measurement of the Hamiltonian expectation value. The current hardware can perform only projective single-qubit measurements, and thus, the Hamiltonian expectation value is obtained by measuring parts of the Hamiltonian rather than the full Hamiltonian. This restriction makes the measurement process inefficient because the number of terms in the Hamiltonian grows as O(N4) with the size of the system, N. To optimize the VQE measurement, one can try to group as many Hamiltonian terms as possible for their simultaneous measurement. Single-qubit measurements allow one to group only the terms commuting within the corresponding single-qubit subspaces or qubit-wise commuting. We found that the qubit-wise commutativity between the Hamiltonian terms can be expressed as a graph and the problem of the optimal grouping is equivalent to finding a minimum clique cover (MCC) for the Hamiltonian graph. The MCC problem is NP-hard, but there exist several polynomial heuristic algorithms to solve it approximately. Several of these heuristics were tested in this work for a set of molecular electronic Hamiltonians. On average, grouping qubit-wise commuting terms reduced the number of operators to measure three times less compared to the total number of terms in the considered Hamiltonians.
The Variational Quantum Eigensolver approach to the electronic structure problem on a quantum computer involves measurement of the Hamiltonian expectation value. Formally, quantum mechanics allows one to measure all mutually commuting or compatible operators simultaneously. Unfortunately, the current hardware permits measuring only a much more limited subset of operators that share a common tensor product eigen-basis. We introduce unitary transformations that transform any fully commuting group of operators to a group that can be measured on current hardware. These unitary operations can be encoded as a sequence of Clifford gates and let us not only measure much larger groups of terms but also to obtain these groups efficiently on a classical computer. The problem of finding the minimum number of fully commuting groups of terms covering the whole Hamiltonian is found to be equivalent to the minimum clique cover problem for a graph representing Hamiltonian terms as vertices and commutativity between them as edges. Tested on a set of molecular electronic Hamiltonians with up to 50 thousand terms, the introduced technique allows for the reduction of the number of separately measurable operator groups down to few hundreds, thus achieving up to 2 orders of magnitude reduction. Based on the test set results, the obtained gain scales at least linearly with the number of qubits.
Current implementations of the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) technique for solving the electronic structure problem involve splitting the system qubit Hamiltonian into parts whose elements commute within their single qubit subspaces. The number of such parts rapidly grows with the size of the molecule, this increases the uncertainty in the measurement of the energy expectation value because elements from different parts need to be measured independently. To address this problem we introduce a more efficient partitioning of the qubit Hamiltonian using fewer parts that need to be measured separately. The new partitioning scheme is based on two ideas: 1) grouping terms into parts whose eigenstates have a single-qubit product structure, and 2) devising multi-qubit unitary transformations for the Hamiltonian or its parts to produce less entangled operators. The first condition allows the new parts to be measured in the number of involved qubit consequential one-particle measurements. Advantages of the new partitioning scheme resulting in several-fold reduction of separately measured terms are illustrated on the H2 and LiH problems.
The Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) requires a large number of measurements to evaluate molecular Hamiltonians. Expressing a molecular Hamiltonian as a linear combination of Pauli strings creates a measurement bottleneck: non-commuting Pauli strings cannot be measured simultaneously. Consequently, mutually commuting Pauli strings must be grouped and measured together to minimise the number of quantum-state preparations. This task maps to the minimum clique cover problem on a commutativity graph, an NP-hard problem typically addressed using classical heuristics. Although an Ising-model formulation has recently been explored on fully connected CMOS Ising machines and demonstrated on physical quantum annealers only at small scale, the embedding cost that governs its behaviour on hardware with sparse connectivity, where each logical variable must be represented by a chain of physical qubits, has not been characterised. In this work, we formulate the Pauli-grouping problem as a standard QUBO colouring model and study its scalability on a D-Wave quantum annealer. Across a series of molecular systems and for both qubit-wise and full commutativity, we quantify the growth in the number of logical variables and the QUBO interaction density, characterise the physical-qubit and chain-length overhead required for embedding on the Zephyr topology, and compare the annealer's time-to-solution and solution quality with those of heuristic classical baselines. This analysis identifies the threshold of molecular complexity beyond which hardware connectivity prevents viable embedding, and shows that a second, practical limit is reached earlier. The threshold therefore measures how far current annealers are from the regime in which pre-optimising a VQE measurement scheme on hardware would be worth considering.
To obtain estimates of electronic energies, the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) technique performs separate measurements for multiple parts of the system Hamiltonian. Current quantum hardware is restricted to projective single-qubit measurements, and, thus, only parts of the Hamiltonian that form mutually qubit-wise commuting groups can be measured simultaneously. The number of such groups in the electronic structure Hamiltonians grows as N 4, where N is the number of qubits, thereby putting serious restrictions on the size of the systems that can be studied. Using a partitioning of the system Hamiltonian as a linear combination of unitary operators, we found a circuit formulation of the VQE algorithm that allows one to measure a group of fully anticommuting terms of the Hamiltonian in a single series of single-qubit measurements. Numerical comparison of the unitary partitioning to previously used grouping of Hamiltonian terms based on their qubit-wise commutativity is consistent with an N -fold reduction in the number of measurable groups.
The Monte Carlo Projective Quantum Eigensolver (MC-PQE) was recently introduced as an alternative to hybrid algorithms like the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). By using a quantum Monte Carlo-inspired scheme for energy estimation, MC\nobreakdash-PQE was found to decrease the required measurement cost relative to comparable conventional approaches. However, in the context of VQE, numerous techniques have been developed to reduce the measurement overhead by joint measurement of multiple observables. In this work, we extend these approaches to the asymmetric expectation values required in MC-PQE and assess the performance of different techniques for various molecular systems of up to 12 qubits. We find full commuting Pauli term grouping combined with tailored measurement allocation techniques leads to a 5-10×\times× reduction in standard error for the same total number of quantum measurements. Conventional Hamiltonian grouped measurement outperforms tractable classical shadows tomography based techniques for the considered systems.
A central roadblock in the realization of variational quantum eigensolvers on quantum hardware is the high overhead associated with measurement repetitions, which hampers the computation of complex problems, such as the simulation of mid- and large-sized molecules. In this work, we propose a novel measurement protocol which relies on computing an approximation of the Hamiltonian expectation value. The method involves measuring cheap grouped operators directly and estimating the residual elements through iterative measurements of new grouped operators in different bases, with the process being truncated at a certain stage. The measured elements comprehend the operators defined by the Hard-Core Bosonic approximation, which encode electron-pair annihilation and creation operators. These can be easily decomposed into three self-commuting groups which can be measured simultaneously. Applied to molecular systems, the method achieves a reduction of 30% to 80% in the number of measurement and gates depth in the measuring circuits compared to state-of-the-art methods. This provides a scalable and cheap measurement protocol, advancing the application of variational approaches for simulating physical systems.