We propose a state-averaged orbital optimization scheme for improving the accuracy of excited states of the electronic structure Hamiltonian for use on near-term quantum computers. Instead of parameterizing the orbital rotation operator in the conventional fashion as an exponential of an antihermitian matrix, we parameterize the orbital rotation as a general partial unitary matrix. Whereas conventional orbital optimization methods minimize the state-averaged energy using successive Newton steps of the second-order Taylor expansion of the energy, the method presented here optimizes the state-averaged energy using an orthogonally constrained gradient projection method that does not require any expansion approximations. Through extensive benchmarking of the method on various small molecular systems, we find that the method is capable of producing more accurate results than fixed basis FCI while simultaneously using fewer qubits. In particular, we show that for H 2, the method is capable of matching the accuracy of FCI in the cc-pVTZ basis (56 qubits) while only using 14 qubits.
We propose a state-averaged orbital optimization scheme for improving the accuracy of excited states of the electronic structure Hamiltonian for use on near-term quantum computers. Instead of parameterizing the orbital rotation operator in the conventional fashion as an exponential of an anti-hermitian matrix, we parameterize the orbital rotation as a general partial unitary matrix. Whereas conventional orbital optimization methods minimize the state-averaged energy using successive Newton steps of the second-order Taylor expansion of the energy, the method presented here optimizes the state-averaged energy using an orthogonally-constrained gradient projection method which does not require any expansion approximations. Through extensive benchmarking of the method on various small molecular systems, we find that the method is capable of producing more accurate results than fixed basis FCI while simultaneously using fewer qubits. In particular, we show that for
H2, the method is capable of matching the accuracy of FCI in the cc-pVTZ basis (56 qubits) while only using 14 qubits.
Near-term quantum computers will be limited in the number of qubits on which they can process information as well as the depth of the circuits that they can coherently carry out. To date, experimental demonstrations of algorithms such as the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) have been limited to small molecules using minimal basis sets for this reason. In this work we propose incorporating an orbital optimization scheme into quantum eigensolvers wherein a parametrized partial unitary transformation is applied to the basis functions set in order to reduce the number of qubits required for a given problem. The optimal transformation is found by minimizing the ground state energy with respect to this partial unitary matrix. Through numerical simulations of small molecules up to 16 spin orbitals, we demonstrate that this method has the ability to greatly extend the capabilities of near-term quantum computers with regard to the electronic structure problem. We find that VQE paired with orbital optimization consistently achieves lower ground state energies than traditional VQE when using the same number of qubits and even frequently achieves lower ground state energies than VQE methods using more qubits.
Within the evolving domain of quantum computational chemistry, the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) has been developed to explore not only the ground state but also the excited states of molecules. In this study, we compare the performance of Variational Quantum Deflation (VQD) and Subspace-Search Variational Quantum Eigensolver (SSVQE) methods in determining the low-lying excited states of
LiH. Our investigation reveals that while VQD exhibits a slight advantage in accuracy, SSVQE stands out for its efficiency, allowing the determination of all low-lying excited states through a single parameter optimization procedure. We further evaluate the effectiveness of optimizers, including Gradient Descent (GD), Quantum Natural Gradient (QNG), and Adam optimizer, in obtaining
LiH's first excited state, with the Adam optimizer demonstrating superior efficiency in requiring the fewest iterations. Moreover, we propose a novel approach combining Folded Spectrum VQE (FS-VQE) with either VQD or SSVQE, enabling the exploration of highly excited states. We test the new approaches for finding all three
H4's excited states. Folded Spectrum SSVQE (FS-SSVQE) can find all three highly excited states near
−1.0 Ha with only one optimizing procedure, but the procedure converges slowly. In contrast, although Folded spectrum VQD (FS-VQD) gets highly excited states with individual optimizing procedures, the optimizing procedure converges faster.
The calculation of excited state energies of electronic structure Hamiltonians has many important applications, such as the calculation of optical spectra and reaction rates. While low-depth quantum algorithms, such as the variational quantum eigenvalue solver (VQE), have been used to determine ground state energies, methods for calculating excited states currently involve the implementation of high-depth controlled-unitaries or a large number of additional samples. Here we show how overlap estimation can be used to deflate eigenstates once they are found, enabling the calculation of excited state energies and their degeneracies. We propose an implementation that requires the same number of qubits as VQE and at most twice the circuit depth. Our method is robust to control errors, is compatible with error-mitigation strategies and can be implemented on near-term quantum computers.
Determining the spectral structure of molecular Hamiltonians is one of the most important and challenging research fields in quantum chemistry. In the near future, such a problem may be solvable by means of quantum simulation. However, constrained by a handful of qubits and noisy quantum gates available in the near-term quantum devices, hybrid quantum-classical algorithms based on variational methods such as variational quantum eigensolver have become a preferable choice. Here we propose an interesting variational quantum algorithm for obtaining the excited states of many-body Hamiltonians. To obtain the kth excited states, the previous variational quantum deflation algorithm requires the use of k different variational circuits, which is now reduced to only two circuits with our algorithm. The feasibility of the algorithm was numerically tested on the hydrogen molecule with and without random noise, where the chemical accuracy is reached for both cases. This algorithm is expected to significantly reduce the resource requirements of quantum simulation.