Quantum computers must operate in concert with classical computers to deliver on the promise of quantum advantage for practical problems. To achieve that, it is important to understand how quantum and classical computing can interact together, and how one can characterize the scalability and efficiency of hybrid quantum–classical workflows. So far, early experiments with quantum-centric supercomputing workflows have been limited in scale and complexity. Here, we use a Heron quantum processor deployed on premises with the entire supercomputer Fugaku to perform the largest computation of electronic structure involving quantum and classical high-performance computing. We design a closed-loop workflow between the quantum processors and 152,064 classical nodes of Fugaku, to approximate the electronic structure of chemistry models beyond the reach of exact diagonalization, with accuracy comparable to some all-classical approximation methods. Our work pushes the limits of the integration of quantum and classical high-performance computing, showcasing computational resource orchestration at the largest scale possible for current classical supercomputers.
We develop a workflow decomposing a molecule into fragments via quantum embedding and simulating them with a heterogeneous quantum-classical (HQC) method. We sample fragment electronic configurations on two 156-qubit quantum processors (ibm
_cleveland, ibm
_kobe), using up to 94 qubits, running 21,006 circuits for over 239 hours, collecting
3.0⋅109 measurement outcomes -- the most resource-intensive HQC computation for quantum chemistry to date. We compute fragment wavefunctions via optimized subspace diagonalization on supercomputers Fugaku, Miyabi-G, and ROQUO, achieving 72.5
% parallel efficiency with scalable distributed linear algebra kernels. We simulate two protein-ligand complexes spanning dispersion- and electrostatics-dominated regimes (11,608, 12,635 atoms), demonstrate
>40× increase in system size and up to
210× improvement in accuracy over previous state-of-the-art, with HQC matching coupled-cluster (CCSD) accuracy in fragment energies. We present the first HQC protein-ligand binding prediction using a mixed-basis set and an automated end-to-end workflow enabling practical HQC calculations of large protein systems.
Quantum-centric supercomputing (QCSC) approaches, such as sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD), combine quantum processors with high-performance computers (HPC), offering a promising route toward solving challenging electronic structure problems. However, implementation of QCSC approaches to large active space calculations is constrained by the associated number of qubits, deep quantum circuits, sampling cost, and large-scale Hamiltonian diagonalization. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a distributed QCSC framework that decomposes complex molecular problems into parallel sub-problems requiring fewer qubits, shallower circuits, and reduced shot budgets. A physically motivated, two-step aggregation scheme then reconstructs the global solution: first, a computational bit assignment strategy optimizes a cost function to appropriately map local bit indices to global ones, yielding a mapped tensor product state (MTPS); second, an inter-fragment correlation recovery module restores missing cross-fragment interactions. Herein, we employ a multi-layered generative machine learning architecture, starting with utilizing the recently proposed physics-informed generative SQD (PIGen-SQD) as a distributed QCSC solver, followed by a secondary generative module to model configuration distributions and identify dominant sectors of the global Hilbert space. For water and formamide dimers, our method achieves up to
95% reduction in the diagonalization dimension while enhancing energy accuracy by an order of magnitude over conventional SQD. Furthermore, application to the water hexamer (
(H2O)6) cage successfully decomposes a 120-qubit problem into six 20-qubit monomeric subsystems, and stitches the monomers under a dimeric approximation, demonstrating excellent agreement with the reference classical methods.
Approximating the ground state of many-body systems is a key computational bottleneck underlying important applications in physics and chemistry. The most widely known quantum algorithm for ground state approximation, quantum phase estimation, is out of reach of current quantum processors due to its high circuit-depths. Subspace-based quantum diagonalization methods offer a viable alternative for pre- and early-fault-tolerant quantum computers. Here, we introduce a quantum diagonalization algorithm which combines two key ideas on quantum subspaces: a classical diagonalization based on quantum samples, and subspaces constructed with quantum Krylov states. We prove that our algorithm converges in polynomial time under the working assumptions of Krylov quantum diagonalization and sparseness of the ground state. We then demonstrate the scalability of our approach by performing the largest ground-state quantum simulation of impurity models using a Heron quantum processors and the Frontier supercomputer. We consider both the single-impurity Anderson model with 41 bath sites, and a system with 4 impurities and 7 bath sites per impurity. Our results are in excellent agreement with Density Matrix Renormalization Group calculations.
Quantum chemistry models atoms and molecules using quantum mechanics, with the electronic structure problem at its core. This problem, which determines the energy and properties of electrons in a molecule, is exponentially hard to solve exactly on classical computers. To approximate solutions, effective models introduce layers of simplifications. However, these approximations can fail for strongly correlated systems, necessitating alternative approaches. Quantum computers, capable of processing quantum information natively, offer a promising path to simulate molecular systems beyond classical reach, with potential applications in catalysis, materials science, and photochemistry. Despite rapid advancements in quantum hardware, practical quantum computations remain challenging due to limited resources. This thesis optimizes quantum resource usage in computational chemistry, introducing novel embedding techniques and exploring applications beyond ground-state energies. Chapter 1 establishes the foundation by reviewing quantum chemistry methods, from Hartree-Fock and Density Functional Theory (DFT) to active space approaches. It also provides an introduction to quantum computing for chemistry, focusing on near-term algorithms. The following chapters present novel methods aimed at reducing quantum resource requirements and tackling problems classical methods struggle with. Chapter 2 introduces a technique to reduce the
λ-norm of the electronic structure Hamiltonian, a key measure of quantum resource demand. By transforming molecular orbitals, this method enhances sampling efficiency in Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) algorithms and reduces runtime in Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing (FTQC). Localized orbitals outperform canonical ones, and an orbital-optimization scheme is proposed to minimize the
λ-norm. Benchmarks on hydrogen chains, FeMoco, and Ruthenium complexes demonstrate its effectiveness. Chapter 3 presents the FragPT2 framework for simulating large systems with multiple interacting fragments. This method embeds each fragment in the mean field of others and applies multi-reference perturbation theory to capture inter-fragment correlations such as dispersion and charge transfer efficiently. The approach reduces computational overhead and enables scalable simulations, as shown in applications to \ce{N2} dimers, aromatic dimers, and butadiene. Chapter 4 focuses on photochemical systems, where multiple electronic states must be treated equally. The state-averaged orbital-optimized variational quantum eigensolver (SAOOVQE) is extended with analytical energy gradients and non-adiabatic couplings, enabling geometry optimizations and simulations of non-adiabatic dynamics on quantum hardware. This is demonstrated by locating the conical intersection in formaldimine, highlighting SAOOVQE’s potential for studying photoisomerization in biomolecules. Building on this, Chapter 5 develops a quantum algorithm to detect conical intersections, where the Born-Oppenheimer approximation breaks down. These intersections are characterized by a discrete Berry phase (0 or
π), representing their topological nature. The algorithm extracts this phase as a single bit of information, ensuring resilience to noise. Analytical proof and numerical validation using a toy molecular model illustrate its effectiveness for studying light-perception biochemistry and related photochemical processes. Finally, Chapter 6 explores machine learning density functionals trained on noisy quantum data. While DFT is computationally efficient, its accuracy depends on approximated exchange-correlation functionals. This work proposes a neural network-based approach to learn the exact functional from quantum data, showing that training on noisy outputs from NISQ devices can mitigate sampling errors. Applications to the Fermi-Hubbard model and other systems demonstrate its potential to generalize and provide accurate results under noise. This thesis advances quantum computational chemistry by optimizing quantum resource usage, developing new embedding strategies, and expanding the scope of quantum simulations beyond ground-state properties. These contributions pave the way for practical quantum algorithms that could revolutionize molecular simulations in the near future.
Abstract Quantum centric supercomputing (QCSC) framework, such as sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD) holds immense promise toward achieving practical quantum utility to solve classically hard sampling problems in quantum chemistry. QCSC leverages quantum computers to perform the classically intractable task of sampling the dominant fermionic configurations from the Hilbert space that have substantial support to a target state, followed by Hamiltonian diagonalization on a classical processor. However, noisy quantum hardware produces erroneous samples upon measurements, making robust and efficient configuration-recovery strategies essential for scalable QCSC pipelines. Toward this, in this work, we introduce PIGen-SQD, an efficiently designed QCSC workflow that utilizes the capability of generative machine learning (ML) along with physics-informed configuration screening via implicit low-rank tensor decompositions for accurate fermionic state reconstruction. The physics-informed pruning is based on a class of efficient perturbative measures that, in conjunction with samples drawn from quantum hardware, provide a substantial overlap with the target state. This distribution induces an anchoring effect on the generative ML models to stochastically explore only the dominant sector of the Hilbert space for effective identification of additional important configurations in a self-consistent manner. Our numerical experiments performed on IBM Heron R2 and R3 quantum processors with up to 58 qubit experiments demonstrate this synergistic workflow produces compact, high-fidelity subspaces that substantially reduce diagonalization cost while maintaining chemical accuracy under strong electronic correlations. With such a concerted integration of classical many-body intuitions, generative ML and quantum computers as a sampling engine, PIGen-SQD offers a promising pathway toward accurate and systematically improvable quantum simulations on utility-scale quantum hardware.