We introduce a novel hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for the near-term computation of expectation values in quantum systems at finite temperatures. This is based on two stages: on the first one, a mixed state approximating a fiducial truncated density matrix is prepared through Variational Quantum Eigensolving (VQE) techniques; this is then followed by a reweighting stage where the expectation values for observables of interest are computed. These two stages can then be iterated again with different hyperparameters to achieve arbitrary accuracy. Resource and time scalability of the algorithm is discussed with a near-term perspective.
We introduce a novel hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for the near-term computation of expectation values in quantum systems at finite temperatures. This is based on two stages: on the first one, a mixed state approximating a fiducial truncated density matrix is prepared through Variational Quantum Eigensolving (VQE) techniques; this is then followed by a reweighting stage where the expectation values for observables of interest are computed. These two stages can then be iterated again with different hyperparameters to achieve arbitrary accuracy. Resource and time scalability of the algorithm is discussed with a near-term perspective.
Hybrid quantum-classical variational algorithms such as the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) and the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) are promising applications for noisy, intermediate-scale quantum computers. Both VQE and QAOA variationally extremize the expectation value of a Hamiltonian. All work to date on VQE and QAOA has been limited to Pauli representations of Hamiltonians. However, many cases exist in which a sparse representation of the Hamiltonian is known but there is no efficient Pauli representation. We extend VQE to general sparse Hamiltonians. We provide a decomposition of a fermionic second-quantized Hamiltonian into a number of one-sparse, self-inverse, Hermitian terms linear in the number of ladder operator monomials in the second-quantized representation. We provide a decomposition of a general d-sparse Hamiltonian into O(d^{2}) such terms. In both cases, a single sample of any term can be obtained using two ansatz state preparations and at most six oracle queries. The number of samples required to estimate the expectation value to precision ε scales as ε^{-2} as for Pauli-based VQE. This widens the domain of applicability of VQE to systems whose Hamiltonian and other observables are most efficiently described in terms of sparse matrices.
Abstract Extracting eigenvalues and eigenvectors of exponentially large matrices will be an important application of near-term quantum computers. The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) treats the case when the matrix is a Hamiltonian. Here, we address the case when the matrix is a density matrix ρ . We introduce the variational quantum state eigensolver (VQSE), which is analogous to VQE in that it variationally learns the largest eigenvalues of ρ as well as a gate sequence V that prepares the corresponding eigenvectors. VQSE exploits the connection between diagonalization and majorization to define a cost function C=Tr(ρ~H) C = Tr ( ρ ̃ H ) where H is a non-degenerate Hamiltonian. Due to Schur-concavity, C is minimized when ρ~=VρV† ρ ̃ = V ρ V † is diagonal in the eigenbasis of H . VQSE only requires a single copy of ρ (only n qubits) per iteration of the VQSE algorithm, making it amenable for near-term implementation. We heuristically demonstrate two applications of VQSE: (1) Principal component analysis, and (2) Error mitigation.
We describe the contextual subspace variational quantum eigensolver (CS-VQE), a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for approximating the ground state energy of a Hamiltonian. The approximation to the ground state energy is obtained as the sum of two contributions. The first contribution comes from a noncontextual approximation to the Hamiltonian, and is computed classically. The second contribution is obtained by using the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) technique to compute a contextual correction on a quantum processor. In general the VQE computation of the contextual correction uses fewer qubits and measurements than the VQE computation of the original problem. Varying the number of qubits used for the contextual correction adjusts the quality of the approximation. We simulate CS-VQE on tapered Hamiltonians for small molecules, and find that the number of qubits required to reach chemical accuracy can be reduced by more than a factor of two. The number of terms required to compute the contextual correction can be reduced by more than a factor of ten, without the use of other measurement reduction schemes. This indicates that CS-VQE is a promising approach for eigenvalue computations on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.
Recent practical approaches for the use of current generation noisy quantum devices in the simulation of quantum many-body problems have been dominated by the use of a variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). These coupled quantum-classical algorithms leverage the ability to perform many repeated measurements to avoid the currently prohibitive gate depths often required for exact quantum algorithms, with the restriction of a parametrized circuit to describe the states of interest. In this work, we show how the calculation of zero-temperature dynamic correlation functions defining the linear response characteristics of quantum systems can also be recast into a modified VQE algorithm, which can be incorporated into the current variational quantum infrastructure. This allows for these important physical expectation values describing the dynamics of the system to be directly converged on the frequency axis, and they approach exactness over all frequencies as the flexibility of the parametrization increases. The frequency resolution hence does not explicitly scale with gate depth, which is approximately twice as deep as a ground-state VQE. We apply the method to compute the single-particle Green's function of ab initio dihydrogen and lithium hydride molecules, and demonstrate the use of a practical active space embedding approach to extend to larger systems. While currently limited by the fidelity of two-qubit gates, whose number is increased compared to the ground-state algorithm on current devices, we believe the approach shows potential for the extraction of frequency dynamics of correlated systems on near-term quantum processors.
The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is one of the most promising quantum algorithms for the near-term noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. The VQE typically involves finding the minimum energy of a quantum Hamiltonian through classical optimization of a parametrized quantum ansatz. One of the bottlenecks in VQEs is the number of quantum circuits to be measured. In this work, we propose a physically intuitive truncation technique that starts the optimization procedure with a truncated Hamiltonian and then gradually transitions to the optimization for the original Hamiltonian via an operator classification method. This strategy allows us to reduce the required number of evaluations for the expectation value of Hamiltonian on a quantum computer. The reduction in required quantum resources for our strategy is substantial and likely scales with the system size. With numerical simulations, we demonstrate our method for various molecular systems.
The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm designed for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware to estimate eigenvalues of many-body Hamiltonians. Unlike fully quantum approaches such as quantum phase estimation (QPE), VQE trades deep coherent circuits for repeated state preparation, measurement, and classical optimization, making it more compatible with limited qubit counts and finite coherence times. Recent developments have focused on reducing quantum resource requirements while retaining chemically meaningful wavefunction structure. In this paper, we examine recent progress in VQE methods for molecular electronic structure with an emphasis on three themes: (i) strategies for circuit and ansatz complexity reduction, including adaptive and selectively screened approaches, (ii) chemically motivated workflows that combine VQE with orbital optimization, fragmentation, and localized active-space ideas to better address strong correlation, and (iii) extensions of VQE to excited-state calculations. Throughout, we emphasize the tradeoffs among parameter count, gate depth, symmetry preservation, measurement overhead, and classical preprocessing, and discuss where these approaches may become most useful for chemically challenging active spaces. We also highlight benchmarking considerations for assessing both accuracy and resource requirements, and conclude with a perspective on regimes in which VQE may offer the greatest long-term value, particularly multireference active spaces and low-lying excited-state manifolds.