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arXiv:2506.15784

Fast simulations of X-ray absorption spectroscopy for battery materials on a quantum computer

Stepan Fomichev, Pablo A. M. Casares, Soni, Jay, Utkarsh Azad, Alexander A. Kunitsa, Arne-Christian Voigt, Jonathan Edward Mueller, Juan Miguel Arrazola

Published Jun 18, 2025• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is a leading technique for understanding structural changes in advanced battery materials such as lithium-excess cathodes. However, extracting critical information like oxidation states from the experimental spectra requires expensive and time-consuming simulations. Building upon a recent proposal to simulate XAS using quantum computers, this work proposes a highly-optimized implementation of the time-domain algorithm for X-ray absorption. Among a host of improvements to Hamiltonian representation, circuit implementation, and measurement strategies, three optimizations are key to the efficiency of the algorithm. The first is the use of product formulas with the compressed double factorized form of the Hamiltonian. The second is recognizing that for spectroscopy applications, it is sufficient to control the error in the eigenvalues of the (approximate) Hamiltonian being implemented by the product formula, rather than the generic error on the full time evolution operator. Using perturbation theory to estimate this eigenvalue error, we find that significantly fewer Trotter steps are needed than expected from the time evolution error bound. The third is the choice of an optimized distribution of samples that takes advantage of the exponentially decaying Lorentzian kernel. Through constant factor resource estimates, we show that a challenging model Li$_4$Mn$_2$O cluster system with 18 spatial orbitals and 22 electrons in the active space can be simulated with 100 logical qubits and less than $4 \times 10^8$ T gates per circuit. Finally, the algorithm is implemented on a simulator, and the reconstructed spectrum is verified against a classical computational reference. The low cost of our algorithm makes it attractive to use on fault-tolerant quantum devices to accelerate the development and commercialization of high-capacity battery cathodes.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2506.15784

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X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is a leading technique for understanding structural changes in advanced battery materials such as lithium-excess cathodes. However, extracting critical information like oxidation states from the experimental spectra requires expensive and time-consuming simulations. Building upon a recent proposal to simulate XAS using quantum computers, this work proposes a highly-optimized implementation of the time-domain algorithm for X-ray absorption. Among a host of improvements to Hamiltonian representation, circuit implementation, and measurement strategies, three optimizations are key to the efficiency of the algorithm. The first is the use of product formulas with the compressed double factorized form of the Hamiltonian. The second is recognizing that for spectroscopy applications, it is sufficient to control the error in the eigenvalues of the (approximate) Hamiltonian being implemented by the product formula, rather than the generic error on the full time evolution operator. Using perturbation theory to estimate this eigenvalue error, we find that significantly fewer Trotter steps are needed than expected from the time evolution error bound. The third is the choice of an optimized distribution of samples that takes advantage of the exponentially decaying Lorentzian kernel. Through constant factor resource estimates, we show that a challenging model Li4_44​Mn2_22​O cluster system with 18 spatial orbitals and 22 electrons in the active space can be simulated with 100 logical qubits and less than 4×1084 \times 10^84×108 T gates per circuit. Finally, the algorithm is implemented on a simulator, and the reconstructed spectrum is verified against a classical computational reference. The low cost of our algorithm makes it attractive to use on fault-tolerant quantum devices to accelerate the development and commercialization of high-capacity battery cathodes.
X-ray absorption spectroscopy is a crucial experimental technique for elucidating the mechanisms of structural degradation in battery materials. However, extracting information from the measured spectrum is challenging without high-quality simulations. In this work, we propose simulating near-edge X-ray absorption spectra as a promising application for quantum computing. It is attractive due to the ultralocal nature of X-ray absorption that significantly reduces the sizes of problems to be simulated, and because of the classical hardness of simulating spectra. We describe three quantum algorithms to compute the X-ray absorption spectrum and provide their asymptotic cost. One of these is a Monte-Carlo based time-domain algorithm, which is cost-friendly to early fault-tolerant quantum computers. We then apply the framework to an industrially relevant example, a CAS(22e,18o) active space for an O-Mn cluster in a Li-excess battery cathode, showing that practically useful simulations could be obtained with much fewer qubits and gates than ground-state energy estimation of the same material.
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Ionic pseudopotentials are widely used in classical simulations of materials to model the effective potential due to the nucleus and the core electrons. Modeling fewer electrons explicitly results in a reduction in the number of plane waves needed to accurately represent the states of a system. In this work, we introduce a quantum algorithm that uses pseudopotentials to reduce the cost of simulating periodic materials on a quantum computer. We use a qubitization-based quantum phase estimation algorithm that employs a first-quantization representation of the Hamiltonian in a plane-wave basis. We address the challenge of incorporating the complexity of pseudopotentials into quantum simulations by developing highly-optimized compilation strategies for the qubitization of the Hamiltonian. This includes a linear combination of unitaries decomposition that leverages the form of separable pseudopotentials. Our strategies make use of quantum read-only memory subroutines as a more efficient alternative to quantum arithmetic. We estimate the computational cost of applying our algorithm to simulating lithium-excess cathode materials for batteries, where more accurate simulations are needed to inform strategies for gaining reversible access to the excess capacity they offer. We estimate the number of qubits and Toffoli gates required to perform sufficiently accurate simulations with our algorithm for three materials: lithium manganese oxide, lithium nickel-manganese oxide, and lithium manganese oxyfluoride. Our optimized compilation strategies result in a pseudopotential-based quantum algorithm with a total Toffoli cost four orders of magnitude lower than the previous state of the art for a fixed target accuracy.
The dynamic structure factor (DSF) is a central quantity for interpreting a vast array of inelastic scattering experiments in chemistry and materials science, but its accurate simulation poses a considerable challenge for classical computational methods. In this work, we present a quantum algorithm and an end-to-end simulation framework to compute the DSF, providing a general approach for simulating momentum-resolved spectroscopies. We apply this approach to the simulation of electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) in the core-level electronic excitation regime, a spectroscopic technique offering sub-nanometer spatial resolution and capable of resolving element-specific information, crucial for analyzing battery materials. We derive a quantum algorithm for computing the DSF for EELS by evaluating the off-diagonal terms of the time-domain Green's function, enabling the simulation of momentum-resolved spectroscopies. To showcase the algorithm, we study the oxygen K-edge EELS spectrum of lithium manganese oxide (Li2MnO3), a prototypical cathode material for investigating the mechanisms of oxygen redox in battery materials. For a representative model of an oxygen-centered cluster of Li2MnO3 with an active space of 18 active orbitals, the algorithm requires a circuit depth of 3.25 × 108 T gates, 100 logical qubits, and roughly 104 shots.
In this study, we employed Fourier-based quantum phase estimation (QPE) to calculate X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) spectra. The primary focus of this study is the calculation of the XAS spectra of transition metal L2,3L_{2,3}L2,3​-edges, which are dominated by strong correlation effects. First, the Fe L2,3L_{2,3}L2,3​-edge X-ray absorption near-edge structure of FePO4_44​ is calculated using a noiseless simulator. The present computation involves a comparison of three types of input states: a uniform superposition state, optimal entangled input state, and Slater function state. Subsequently, we investigated the resolution error of the QPE and statistical error attributed to the measurements. It was revealed that post-processing to introduce Lorentzian broadening reduces the statistical error, which becomes a significant problem for a large number of qubits. Subsequently, we implemented QPE on a trapped-ion quantum computer, encompassing three orbitals within the active space. To this end, we implemented QPE using dynamic circuits to reduce ancilla qubits and [[k+2, k, 2]] quantum error detection code to mitigate the quantum noise inherent in current quantum computers. As a result, it was demonstrated that hardware noise was reduced, and spectra close to the noiseless ones were obtained.
Cathode lithiation occupies a chemical regime of tightly localized orbitals, narrow bandwidths, and strong electron-lattice coupling. The defining electrochemical observables (open-circuit voltage and differential capacity) are open-system, reservoir-equilibration quantities that closed-Hamiltonian quantum simulation cannot produce, set by exchange with electron, Li+^++, and phonon baths. We present a fault-tolerant quantum algorithm that recovers them through a unitary chain-mapped Caldeira-Leggett embedding, rendering the baths Trotterizable. The resulting fourth-order Trotter step has a T-gate count polynomial in system size, validating its open-system dynamics against hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM) at strong coupling and the Lindblad limit at weak coupling. For single-carrier olivine LiFePO4_44​, a single voltage anchor on an otherwise DFT-fixed Hamiltonian places the differential-capacity peak within the ±5\pm5±5 mV reproducibility of the experimental plateau. For multi-carrier spinel LiMn2_22​O4_44​, whose 1:11{:}11:1 Mn3+^{3+}3+/Mn4+^{4+}4+ filling makes the inter-site Coulomb repulsion dynamically active, the same kernel yields a two-plateau voltage curve with a 125125125 mV split, within 17%17\%17% of the observed 150150150 mV. We deliver an end-to-end fault-tolerant resource estimate for such a multi-carrier, three-reservoir observable: 368368368 logical qubits and ∼3×105\sim3\times10^5∼3×105 T-gates per step, or ∼1.7×1012\sim1.7\times10^{12}∼1.7×1012 T-gates for a full voltage curve (parallelizable over ∼103\sim10^3∼103 trajectories), leaving the production-scale dynamical run as a milestone for future hardware. The same kernel reproduces macroscopic quantum coherence, two-band superconductivity, and the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein resonance without modification, placing dynamical battery chemistry and similar Hamiltonians within scope for fault-tolerant quantum simulation.