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arXiv:2404.09527 · npj Computational Materials

Dynamical mean field theory for real materials on a quantum computer

Johannes Selisko, Maximilian Amsler, Christopher Wever, Yukio Kawashima, Ge. G. Samsonidze, Rukhsan Ul Haq, Francesco Tacchino, Ivano Tavernelli, Thomas Eckl

Published Oct 31, 2025• 5 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum computers (QC) could harbor the potential to significantly advance materials simulations, particularly at the atomistic scale involving strongly correlated fermionic systems, where an accurate description of quantum many-body effects scales unfavorably with size. While a full-scale treatment of condensed matter systems with currently available noisy quantum computers remains elusive, quantum embedding schemes like dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) allow the mapping of an effective, reduced subspace Hamiltonian to available devices to improve the accuracy of ab initio calculations such as density functional theory (DFT). Here, we report on the development of a hybrid quantum-classical DFT + DMFT simulation framework which relies on a quantum impurity solver based on the Lehmann representation of the impurity Green’s function. Hardware experiments with up to 14 qubits on the IBM Quantum system are conducted, using advanced error mitigation methods and a novel calibration scheme for an improved zero-noise extrapolation to effectively reduce adverse effects from inherent noise on current quantum devices. We showcase the utility of our quantum DFT + DMFT workflow by assessing the correlation effects on the electronic structure of a real material, Ca 2 CuO 2 Cl 2 , which is mapped to an effective single-band Hubbard Hamiltonian and the subsequently derived Anderson impurity model solved with up to 6 bath sites on available quantum hardware. Further, we carefully benchmark our quantum results with respect to exact reference solutions and experimental spectroscopy measurements. While challenges remain to scale our approach to larger, multi-orbital and multi-site systems with more bath sites, the present work marks an important milestone towards achieving utility-scale quantum computation in materials simulation.

DOI
10.1038/s41524-025-01772-6

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We design a hybrid quantum-classical computational workflow, combining density functional theory and dynamical mean-field theory, to investigate the electronic properties of CaCuO2, a parent structure of high-temperature cuprate superconductors. Our approach uses a quantum algorithm as an impurity solver that is based on variational quantum compressed time evolution to compute the time-dependent Greens function on an IBM Heron quantum device. Utilizing error mitigation techniques and a Lehmann representation fitting procedure, we extract the density of states from the signal in the accessible time regime. Despite the significant challenges rooted in the residual imprecision of currently accessible NISQ devices, we successfully resolve the characteristic features of the spectral function. However, we find that the required numerical accuracy for full DMFT self-consistency exceeds current hardware capabilities, indicating that practical real-material DMFT applications will necessitate post-NISQ hardware developments.
The accurate theoretical description of materials with strongly correlated electrons is a formidable challenge in condensed matter physics and computational chemistry. Dynamical Mean Field Theory (DMFT) is a successful approach that predicts behaviors of such systems by incorporating some of the correlated behavior using an impurity model, but it is limited by the need to calculate the impurity Green’s function. This work proposes a framework for DMFT calculations on quantum computers, focusing on near-term applications. It leverages the structure of the impurity problem, combining a low-rank Gaussian subspace representation of the ground state and a compressed, short-depth quantum circuit that joins state preparation with time evolution to compute Green’s functions. We demonstrate the convergence of the DMFT algorithm using the Gaussian subspace in a noise-free setting, and show the hardware viability of circuit compression by extracting the impurity Green’s function on IBM quantum processors for a single impurity coupled to three bath orbitals (8 qubits, 1 ancilla). We discuss potential paths toward realizing this quantum computing use case in materials science.
Quantum embedding methods, such as dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT), provide a powerful framework for investigating strongly correlated materials. A central computational bottleneck in DMFT is in solving the Anderson impurity model (AIM), whose exact solution is classically intractable for large bath sizes. In this work, we develop and benchmark a quantum-classical hybrid solver tailored for DMFT applications, using the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) to prepare the ground state of the AIM with shallow quantum circuits. The solver uses a unified ansatz framework to prepare the particle and hole excitations of the ground-state from parameter-shifted circuits, enabling the reconstruction of the impurity Green's function through a continued-fraction expansion. We evaluate the performance of this approach across a few bath sizes and interaction strengths under noisy, shot-limited conditions. We compare three optimization routines (COBYLA, Adam, and L-BFGS-B) in terms of convergence and fidelity, assess the benefits of estimating a quantum-computed moment (QCM) correction to the variational energies, and benchmark the approach by comparing the reconstructed density of states (DOS) against that obtained using a classical pipeline. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of Green's function reconstruction on near-term devices and establish practical benchmarks for quantum impurity solvers embedded within self-consistent DMFT loops.