Introducing an active space approximation is inevitable for the quantum computations of chemical systems. However, this approximation ignores the electron correlations related to nonactive orbitals. Here, we propose a computational method for correcting quantum computing results using a well-established classical theory called coupled cluster theory. Our approach efficiently extracts the quantum state from a quantum device by computational basis tomography. The extracted expansion coefficients of the quantum state are embedded into the coupled cluster ansatz within the framework of the tailored coupled cluster method. We demonstrate the performance of our method by verifying the potential energy curves of LiH, H 2 O , and N 2 with a correlation-energy correction scheme. Our method demonstrates reasonable potential energy curves even when the standard coupled cluster fails. The sufficient numbers of measurements for tomography were also investigated. Furthermore, this method successfully estimated the activation energy of the Cope rearrangement reaction of 1,5-hexadiene together with perturbative triples correction. These demonstrations suggest that our approach has the potential for practical quantum chemical calculations using quantum computers. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Introducing an active space approximation is inevitable for the quantum computations of chemical systems. However, this approximation ignores the electron correlations related to nonactive orbitals. Here, we propose a computational method for correcting quantum computing results using a well-established classical theory called coupled cluster theory. Our approach efficiently extracts the quantum state from a quantum device by computational basis tomography. The extracted expansion coefficients of the quantum state are embedded into the coupled cluster ansatz within the framework of the tailored coupled cluster method. We demonstrate the performance of our method by verifying the potential energy curves of LiH, H 2 O , and N 2 with a correlation-energy correction scheme. Our method demonstrates reasonable potential energy curves even when the standard coupled cluster fails. The sufficient numbers of measurements for tomography were also investigated. Furthermore, this method successfully estimated the activation energy of the Cope rearrangement reaction of 1,5-hexadiene together with perturbative triples correction. These demonstrations suggest that our approach has the potential for practical quantum chemical calculations using quantum computers. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We present the quantum-selected configuration interaction-tailored coupled-cluster (QSCI-TCC) method, a hybrid quantum-classical scheme that tailors coupled-cluster (CC) theory with a quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI) wave function. QSCI provides a scalable, shot-efficient approach to reconstructing the many-electron state prepared on quantum hardware on a classical computer. The resulting active-space CI coefficients, which are free from additive shot noise, are mapped to fixed cluster amplitudes within the tailored coupled-cluster framework, after which a conventional CC calculation optimizes the remaining amplitudes. This workflow embeds static (strong) correlation from the quantum device and subsequently recovers dynamical (weak) correlation, yielding a balanced description of both. The method is classically simulated and applied to the simultaneous O-H bond dissociation in H2O and the triple-bond dissociation in N2. QSCI-TCC and its perturbative-triples variant, QSCI-TCC(T), provide accurate results even where CCSD or CCSD(T) begin to break down. Shot-count tests for the N2 (6e, 6o) active space demonstrate that, with the (c) correction, chemically sufficient precision (≤1 kcal/mol) is achieved with only 1.0×105 shots in the strongly correlated regime (r=2.2 Å) -- an order of magnitude fewer than required by an earlier matchgate-shadows implementation [J. Chem. Theory Comput., 20, 5068 (2024)]. By pairing resource-efficient quantum sampling with the CC theory, QSCI-TCC provides a promising pathway to quantum-chemical calculations of classically intractable systems.
A unitary coupled cluster (UCC) form for the wave function in the variational quantum eigensolver has been suggested as a systematic way to go beyond the mean-field approximation and include electron correlation in solving quantum chemistry problems on a quantum computer. Although being exact in the limit of including all possible coupled cluster excitations, practically, the accuracy of this approach depends on the number and type of terms are included in the wave function parametrization. Another difficulty of UCC is a growth of the number of simultaneously entangled qubits even at the fixed Fermionic excitation rank. Not all quantum computing architectures can cope with this growth. To address both problems, we introduce a qubit coupled cluster (QCC) method that starts directly in the qubit space and uses energy response estimates for ranking the importance of individual entanglers for the variational energy minimization. Also, we provide an exact factorization of a unitary rotation of more than two qubits to a product of two-qubit unitary rotations. Thus, the QCC method with the factorization technique can be limited to only two-qubit entanglement gates and allows for very efficient use of quantum resources in terms of the number of coupled cluster operators. The method performance is illustrated by calculating ground-state potential energy curves of H 2 and LiH molecules with chemical accuracy, ≤1 kcal/mol, and a symmetric water dissociation curve.
The workhorse method of computational materials science is undeniably density functional theory in the Kohn-Sham framework of approximate exchange and correlation energy functionals. However, the need for highly accurate predictions of ground and excited state properties in materials science motivates the further development and exploration of alternative as well as complementary techniques. Among these alternative approaches, quantum chemical wavefunction based theories and in particular coupled cluster theory hold the promise to fill a gap in the toolbox of computational materials scientists. Coupled cluster (CC) theory provides a compelling framework of approximate infinite-order perturbation theory in the form of an exponential of cluster operators describing the true quantum many-body effects of the electronic wave function at a computational cost that, despite being significantly more expensive than DFT, scales polynomially with system size. The hierarchy of size-extensive approximate methods established in the framework of CC theory achieves systematic improvability for many materials properties. This is in contrast to currently available density functionals that often suffer from uncontrolled approximations that limit the accuracy in the prediction of materials properties. In this tutorial-style review we will introduce basic concepts of coupled cluster theory and recent developments that increase its computational efficiency for calculations of molecules, solids and materials in general. We will touch upon the connection between coupled cluster theory and the random-phase approximation to bridge the gap between traditional quantum chemistry and many-body Green’s function theories that are widely-used in the field of solid state physics. We will discuss various approaches to improve the computational performance without compromising accuracy. These approaches include large-scale parallel design as well as techniques that reduce the prefactor of the computational complexity. A central part of this article discusses the convergence of calculated properties to the thermodynamic limit which is of significant importance for reliable predictions of materials properties and constitutes an additional challenge compared to calculations of large molecules. Furthermore we mention technical aspects of computer code implementations of periodic coupled cluster theories in different numerical frameworks of the one-electron orbital basis; the projector-augmented-wave formalism using a plane wave basis set and the numeric atom-centered-orbital with resolution-of-identity.
The practical application of quantum technologies to chemical problems faces significant challenges, particularly in the treatment of realistic basis sets and the accurate inclusion of electron correlation effects. A direct approach to these problems is currently infeasible due to limitations in the number of logical qubits, their fidelity, and the shallow circuit depths supported by existing hardware, all of which hinder simulations at the required level of accuracy. A promising alternative is hybrid quantum-classical computing, where classical resources are used to construct effective Hamiltonians characterized by dimensions that conform to the constraints of current quantum devices. In this paper, we demonstrate the performance of a hybrid approach: coupled cluster downfolded Hamiltonians are first evaluated in reduced-dimensionality active spaces, and the corresponding ground-state energies are subsequently computed using quantum algorithms. Our comprehensive analysis explores the achievable accuracy in recovering correlation energies when hundreds of orbitals are downfolded into a problem size tractable by today’s quantum hardware. We argue that such flexible hybrid algorithms, where problem size can be tailored to available quantum resources, can serve as a bridge between noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices and future fault-tolerant quantum computers, marking a step toward the early realization of quantum advantage in chemistry.
Quantum computation is one of the most promising new paradigms for the simulation of physical systems composed of electrons and atomic nuclei, with applications in chemistry, solid-state physics, materials science, and molecular biology. This requires a truncated representation of the electronic structure Hamiltonian using a finite number of orbitals. While it is, in principle, obvious how to improve on the representation by including more orbitals, this is usually unfeasible in practice (e.g., because of the limited number of qubits available) and severely compromises the accuracy of the obtained results. Here, we propose a quantum algorithm that improves on the representation of the physical problem by virtue of second-order perturbation theory. In particular, our quantum algorithm evaluates the second-order energy correction through a series of time-evolution steps under the unperturbed Hamiltonian. An important application is to go beyond the active-space approximation, allowing to include corrections of virtual orbitals, known as multireference perturbation theory. Here, we exploit the fact that the unperturbed Hamiltonian is diagonal for virtual orbitals and show that the number of qubits is independent of the number of virtual orbitals. This gives rise to more accurate energy estimates without increasing the number of qubits. Moreover, we demonstrate numerically for realistic chemical systems that the total runtime has highly favorable scaling in the number of virtual orbitals compared to previous studies. Numerical calculations confirm the necessity of the multireference perturbation theory energy corrections to reach accurate ground-state energy estimates. Our perturbation theory quantum algorithm can also be applied to symmetry-adapted perturbation theory. As such, we demonstrate that perturbation theory can help to reduce the quantum hardware requirements for quantum chemistry. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Applications of quantum simulation algorithms to obtain electronic energies of molecules on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices require careful consideration of resources describing the complex electron correlation effects. In modeling second-quantized problems, the biggest challenge confronted is that the number of qubits scales linearly with the size of the molecular basis. This poses a significant limitation on the size of the basis sets and the number of correlated electrons included in quantum simulations of chemical processes. To address this issue and enable more realistic simulations on NISQ computers, we employ the double unitary coupled-cluster (DUCC) method to effectively downfold correlation effects into the reduced-size orbital space, commonly referred to as the active space. Using downfolding techniques, we demonstrate that properly constructed effective Hamiltonians can capture the effect of the whole orbital space in small-size active spaces. Combining the downfolding preprocessing technique with the variational quantum eigensolver, we solve for the ground-state energy of H 2, Li 2, and BeH 2 in the cc-pVTZ basis using the DUCC-reduced active spaces. We compare these results to full configuration-interaction and high-level coupled-cluster reference calculations.