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arXiv:2008.09492 · Physical Review Research

Variational quantum simulation for periodic materials

Nobuyuki Yoshioka, Takeshi Sato, Yuya O. Nakagawa, Yu-ya Ohnishi, Wataru Mizukami

Published Jan 26, 2022• 48 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present a quantum-classical hybrid algorithm that simulates electronic structures of periodic systems such as ground states and quasiparticle band structures. By extending the unitary coupled cluster (UCC) theory to describe crystals in arbitrary dimensions, for a hydrogen chain, we numerically demonstrate that the UCC ansatz implemented on a quantum circuit can be successfully optimized with a small deviation from the exact diagonalization over the entire range of the potential energy curves. Furthermore, by using the quantum subspace expansion method, in which we truncate the Hilbert space within the linear response regime from the ground state, the quasiparticle band structure is computed as charged excited states. Our work establishes a powerful interface between the rapidly developing quantum technology and modern material science.

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.4.013052

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•Oct 3, 2020•1 citation
We present a quantum-classical hybrid algorithm that simulates electronic structures of periodic systems such as ground states and quasiparticle band structures. By extending the unitary coupled cluster (UCC) theory to describe crystals in arbitrary dimensions, for a hydrogen chain, we numerically demonstrate that the UCC ansatz implemented on a quantum circuit can be successfully optimized with a small deviation from the exact diagonalization over the entire range of the potential energy curves. Furthermore, by using the quantum subspace expansion method, in which we truncate the Hilbert space within the linear response regime from the ground state, the quasiparticle band structure is computed as charged excited states. Our work establishes a powerful interface between the rapidly developing quantum technology and modern material science.
We demonstrate the use of the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to simulate solid state crystalline materials. We adapt the Unitary Coupled Cluster ansatz to periodic boundary conditions in real space and momentum space representations and directly map complex cluster operators to a quantum circuit ansatz to take advantage of the reduced number of excitation operators and Hamiltonian terms due to momentum conservation. To further reduce required quantum resources, such as the number of UCCSD amplitudes, circuit depth, required number of qubits and number of measurement circuits, we investigate a translational Quantum Subspace Expansion method (TransQSE) for the localized representation of the periodic Hamiltonian. Additionally, we also demonstrate an extension of the point group symmetry based qubit tapering method to periodic systems. We compare accuracy and computational costs for a range of geometries for 1D chains of dimerized hydrogen, helium and lithium hydride with increasing number of momentum space grid points and also demonstrate VQE calculations for 2D and 3D hydrogen and helium lattices. Our presented strategies enable the use of near-term quantum hardware to perform solid state simulation with variational quantum algorithms.
The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is one of the most appealing quantum algorithms to simulate electronic structure properties of molecules on near-term noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. In this work, we generalize the VQE algorithm for simulating periodic systems. However, the numerical study of a one-dimensional (1D) infinite hydrogen chain using existing VQE algorithms shows a remarkable deviation of the ground-state energy with respect to the exact full configuration interaction (FCI) result. Here, we present two schemes to improve the accuracy of quantum simulations for periodic systems. The first one is a modified VQE algorithm, which introduces a unitary transformation of Hartree-Fock orbitals to avoid the complex wave function. The second one is combining VQE with the quantum subspace expansion approach (VQE/QSE). Numerical benchmark calculations demonstrate that both of the two schemes provide an accurate description of the potential energy curve of the 1D hydrogen chain. In addition, excited states computed with the VQE/QSE approach also agree very well with FCI results.
Development of quantum architectures during the last decade has inspired hybrid classical-quantum algorithms in physics and quantum chemistry that promise simulations of fermionic systems beyond the capability of modern classical computers, even before the era of quantum computing fully arrives. Strong research efforts have been recently made to obtain minimal depth quantum circuits which could accurately represent chemical systems. Here, we show that unprecedented methods used in quantum chemistry, designed to simulate molecules on quantum processors, can be extended to calculate properties of periodic solids. In particular, we present minimal depth circuits implementing the variational quantum eigensolver algorithm and successfully use it to compute the band structure of silicon on a quantum machine for the first time. We are convinced that the presented quantum experiments performed on cloud-based platforms will stimulate more intense studies towards scalable electronic structure computation of advanced quantum materials.
Abstract The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm combines the ability of quantum computers to efficiently compute expectation values with a classical optimization routine in order to approximate ground state energies of quantum systems. In this paper, we study the application of VQE to the simulation of molecular energies using the unitary coupled cluster (UCC) ansatz. We introduce new strategies to reduce the circuit depth for the implementation of UCC and improve the optimization of the wavefunction based on efficient classical approximations of the cluster amplitudes. Additionally, we propose an analytical method to compute the energy gradient that reduces the sampling cost for gradient estimation by several orders of magnitude compared to numerical gradients. We illustrate our methodology with numerical simulations for a system of four hydrogen atoms that exhibit strong correlation and show that the circuit depth of VQE using a UCC ansatz can be reduced without introducing significant loss of accuracy in the final wavefunctions and energies.
In this work we investigate methods to improve the efficiency and scalability of quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry applications. We propose a transformation of the electronic structure Hamiltonian in the second quantization framework into the particle-hole picture, which offers a better starting point for the expansion of the system wave function. The state of the molecular system at study is parametrized so as to constrain the sampling of the corresponding wave function within the sector of the molecular Fock space that contains the desired solution. To this end, we explore different mapping schemes to encode the molecular ground state wave function in a quantum register. Taking advantage of known post-Hartree-Fock quantum chemistry approaches and heuristic Hilbert space search quantum algorithms, we propose a new family of quantum circuits based on exchange-type gates that enable accurate calculations while keeping the gate count (i.e., the circuit depth) low. The particle-hole implementation of the unitary coupled-cluster (UCC) method within the variational quantum eigensolver approach gives rise to an efficient quantum algorithm, named q-UCC, with important advantages compared to the straightforward translation of the classical coupled-cluster counterpart. In particular, we show how a single Trotter step in the expansion of the system wave function can accurately and efficiently reproduce the ground-state energy of simple molecular systems.
Establishing a predictive ab initio method for solid systems is one of the fundamental goals in condensed matter physics and computational materials science. We demonstrate that artificial neural networks can simulate first-principles calculations of extended periodic materials. The stochastic optimization of a highly expressive ansatz accurately provides the ground-state energy of a one-dimensional system up to the thermodynamic limit, reaching its chemical accuracy. The correlation energy is simulated precisely also for real solids in both two and three dimensions. We further show that multiple excited states corresponding to the quasiparticle band structure can be obtained with an additional small computation exploiting a technique developed from quantum simulations.