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arXiv:2211.10501 · Physica Scripta

Iterative qubit coupled cluster using only clifford circuits

James Corgan Brown, Marc P. Coons, Erika Lloyd, Alexandre Fleury, Krzysztof Bieniasz, Valentin Senicourt, Arman Zaribafiyan

Published Sep 24, 2025• 1 citation

Abstract

Abstract The performance of quantum algorithms for ground-state energy estimation is directly impacted by the quality of the initial state, where quality is traditionally defined in terms of the overlap of the input state with the target state. An ideal state preparation protocol can be characterized by being easily generated classically and can be transformed to a quantum circuit with minimal overhead while having a significant overlap with the targeted eigenstate of a given Hamiltonian. We propose a method that meets these requirements by introducing a variant of the iterative qubit coupled cluster (iQCC) approach, which exclusively uses Clifford circuits. These circuits can be efficiently simulated on a classical computer, with polynomial scaling according to the Gottesman–Knill theorem. Since the iQCC method has been developed as a quantum algorithm firstly, our variant can be mapped naturally to quantum hardware. We additionally implemented several optimizations to the algorithm enhancing its scalability. We demonstrate the algorithm’s correctness in ground-state simulations for small molecules such as H2, LiH, and H2O, and extend our study to complex systems like the titanium-based compound Ti(C5H5)(CH3)3 with a (20, 20) active space, requiring 40 qubits. Results show that the convergence of the algorithm is well-behaved, and the ground state can be represented accurately. Moreover, we show an automated workflow for restricting the qubit active space, thus relieving computational resources by considering only qubits affected by non-trivial operations.

DOI: 10.1088/1402-4896/ae0b08

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Abstract The performance of quantum algorithms for ground-state energy estimation is directly impacted by the quality of the initial state, where quality is traditionally defined in terms of the overlap of the input state with the target state. An ideal state preparation protocol can be characterized by being easily generated classically and can be transformed to a quantum circuit with minimal overhead while having a significant overlap with the targeted eigenstate of a given Hamiltonian. We propose a method that meets these requirements by introducing a variant of the iterative qubit coupled cluster (iQCC) approach, which exclusively uses Clifford circuits. These circuits can be efficiently simulated on a classical computer, with polynomial scaling according to the Gottesman–Knill theorem. Since the iQCC method has been developed as a quantum algorithm firstly, our variant can be mapped naturally to quantum hardware. We additionally implemented several optimizations to the algorithm enhancing its scalability. We demonstrate the algorithm’s correctness in ground-state simulations for small molecules such as H2, LiH, and H2O, and extend our study to complex systems like the titanium-based compound Ti(C5H5)(CH3)3 with a (20, 20) active space, requiring 40 qubits. Results show that the convergence of the algorithm is well-behaved, and the ground state can be represented accurately. Moreover, we show an automated workflow for restricting the qubit active space, thus relieving computational resources by considering only qubits affected by non-trivial operations.

Abstract The iterative qubit coupled cluster (iQCC) method is a systematic variational approach to solve the electronic structure problem on universal quantum computers. It is able to use arbitrarily shallow quantum circuits at expense of iterative canonical transformation of the Hamiltonian and rebuilding a circuit. Here we present a variety of a posteriori corrections to the iQCC energies to reduce the number of iterations to achieve the desired accuracy. Our energy corrections are based on a low-order perturbation theory series that can be efficiently evaluated on a classical computer. Moreover, capturing a part of the total energy perturbatively, allows us to formulate the qubit active-space concept, in which only a subset of all qubits is treated variationally. As a result, further reduction of quantum resource requirements is achieved. We demonstrate the utility and efficiency of our approach numerically on the examples of 10-qubit N 2 molecule dissociation, the 24-qubit H 2 O symmetric stretch, and 56-qubit singlet-triplet gap calculations for the technologically important complex, tris-(2-phenylpyridine)iridium(III) Ir(ppy) 3 .

An iterative version of the qubit coupled cluster (QCC) method [I. G. Ryabinkin et al., J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2019, 14, 6317] is proposed. The new method seeks to find ground electronic energies of molecules on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. Each iteration involves a canonical transformation of the Hamiltonian and employs constant-size quantum circuits at the expense of increasing the Hamiltonian size. We numerically studied the convergence of the method on ground-state calculations for LiH, H 2 O, and N 2 molecules and found that the exact ground-state energies can be systematically approached only if the generators of the QCC ansatz are sampled from a specific set of operators. We report an algorithm for constructing this set that scales linearly with the size of the Hamiltonian.

We introduce the multistate iterative qubit coupled cluster (MS-iQCC) method, a quantum-inspired algorithm that runs efficiently on classical hardware and is designed to predict both ground and excited electronic states of molecules. Accurate excited-state energetics are essential for interpreting spectroscopy and chemical reactivity, but standard electronic structure methods are either too computationally expensive for larger systems or lose reliability in the presence of strong electron correlation. MS-iQCC addresses this challenge by simultaneously optimizing multiple electronic states in a single, state-averaged procedure that treats ground and excited states on equal footing. This removes the energetic bias that is introduced when excited states are computed one at a time and constrained to remain orthogonal to previously optimized states. The approach supports multireference electronic structure by allowing multideterminantal initial guesses and by adaptively building a compact exponential ansatz from a pool of qubit excitation generators. We apply MS-iQCC to H

_4

, H

_2

O, N

_2

, and C

_2

, including strongly correlated geometries, and observe robust convergence of all targeted state energies to chemically meaningful accuracy across their potential energy surfaces.

Ab initio quantum chemistry simulations are crucially useful for the accurate prediction andunderstanding of chemical phenomena. The quality of such simulations rely heavily on precise solutions to the electronic structure problem. To facilitate the approximate yet efficient solving of the electronic structure problem, many methods rely on a set of problem assumptions, such as the validity of truncations of the fermionic excitation hierarchy, or active space selections. In this work, we describe black-box algorithms for the electronic structure problem, namely the iterative qubit coupled cluster (iQCC) algorithm along with a few of its variants and extensions. The iQCC method is a variational adaptive technique, where an iteratively updated effective Hamiltonian directly guides the selection of transformation generators of the next iteration. We describe the algorithm in detail, and introduce variations of the algorithm to alleviate the proliferation of terms in the effective Hamiltonians. Finally, we describe how the algorithm can be modified to perform simultaneuous determination of ground and excited states. These methods are amenable to implementation using near-term quantum computing devices, and with certain restrictions on meta-parameters, can be implemented as fully classical “quantum-inspired” algorithms. ii

The Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) is a promising algorithm for future Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices to simulate chemical systems. In this paper, we consider the classical simulation of the iterative Qubit Coupled Cluster (iQCC) ansatz. To this end, we implement a multi-threaded sparse wave function simulator and simulate iQCC circuits with up to 80 qubits and 980 entanglers to compare our results to experimental values and previous approximate simulations. In contrast to previous iQCC simulations, e.g., for computing the emission spectra of a phosphorescent emitting material, our approach features a variational guarantee, such that the resulting energies are true upper bounds on the exact energies. Additionally, our method is two orders of magnitude more memory efficient because it does not store the transformed Hamiltonians. Our theoretical analysis also enables the construction of ansätze with a limited number of nonzero amplitudes, for which our simulator can obtain exact results.This will allow one to generate complex benchmarking instances for future NISQ devices and simulators.

Recently (Physica Scripta, 100(10):105401, 2025), an algorithm was introduced that deterministically generates a Clifford transformation from the Qubit Coupled Cluster (QCC) algorithm which we call Q-Cliff (QCC+Clifford). There, it was shown that Q-Cliff could be utilized to generate a hardware efficient version of the QCC ansatz. Here, we examine and refine these techniques and show that Q-Cliff can be utilized to generate efficient classical and quantum approximations to the ground states of chemical systems. The algorithm generates an efficient variational method that generally has accuracy between MP2 and CISD with

O(N^6)

. Furthermore, we show through DMRG calculations that the entanglement between qubits is reduced significantly and therefore the accuracy for a given bond dimension can be vastly improved (up to an order of magnitude). Finally, we refine the previously reported algorithm to generate low-depth and CNOT efficient circuits that can be optimized with a comparable number of energy evaluations to state-of-the-art VQE algorithms. All these results show that this Hamiltonian derived Clifford transformation should be a tool used for many classical and quantum algorithms.