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arXiv:2601.05788

On the robustness of Quantum Phase Estimation to compute ground properties of many-electron systems

Wassil Sennane, Jérémie Messud

quant-phSubmitted Jan 9, 2026• Announced Jan 12, 2026• 0 citations• Revised Apr 18, 2026 (v3)
v1 · Jan 9, 2026v2 · Jan 28, 2026v3 · Apr 18, 2026
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Abstract

We propose an analysis of the Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) algorithm applied to many-electron systems by investigating its free parameters such as the time step, number of phase qubits, initial state preparation, number of measurement shots, and other parameters related to the unitary operators implementation. A deep understanding of these parameters and their impact on QPE probability of success and precision of the results is important to pave the way towards more automation of QPE applied to predictive computational chemistry and material science. We here explicit a constructive method to set the QPE free parameters for ground energy estimation and ground state projection, gathering disseminated results from previous works, refining these results and developing new conditions for achieving target performance. We detail the impact of the QPE `blurring function', related to discretization effects, and propose a method to overcome corresponding pathologies. We finally demonstrate that, using the conditions gathered here, the complexity of the Trotterized version of QPE tends to depend mostly on physical system properties and weakly on the number of phase qubits. Various numerical results illustrate the impact of QPE free parameters on success probability and discretization effects. The impact of Trotterization and other features on the precision of the results are illustrated by first numerical simulations on the H2 molecule, that allows us to derive useful insights.

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We propose an analysis of the Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) algorithm applied to many-electron systems by investigating its free parameters such as the time step, number of phase qubits, initial state preparation, number of measurement shots, and other parameters related to the unitary operators implementation. A deep understanding of these parameters and their impact on QPE probability of success and precision of the results is important to pave the way towards more automation of QPE applied to predictive computational chemistry and material science. We here explicit a constructive method to set the QPE free parameters for ground energy estimation and ground state projection, gathering disseminated results from previous works, refining these results and developing new conditions for achieving target performance. We detail the impact of the QPE `blurring function', related to discretization effects, and propose a method to overcome corresponding pathologies. We finally demonstrate that, using the conditions gathered here, the complexity of the Trotterized version of QPE tends to depend mostly on physical system properties and weakly on the number of phase qubits. Various numerical results illustrate the impact of QPE free parameters on success probability and discretization effects. The impact of Trotterization and other features on the precision of the results are illustrated by first numerical simulations on the H2 molecule, that allows us to derive useful insights.
Beyond ground state energy estimation, quantum phase estimation (QPE) applied to many-electron systems has the potential to output an approximation of the ground state, enabling in a second step an evaluation of observables other than the energy. We here focus on the impact of approximate controlled-unitaries implementations on QPE precision. After recalling the role of the QPE free parameters, we derive first-order and unified conditions on the unitaries that are necessary to control the QPE energy estimation precision together with the QPE output state precision, important in case we want to leverage the full potential of QPE. We apply these conditions to a Trotterization case, leading to tighter or more general bounds than in previous works. The main results in this article are formal. First numerical illustrations on the H2 molecule provide useful insights.
We numerically investigate quantum circuit elementary-gate level instantiations of the standard Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) algorithm for the task of computing the ground-state energy of a quantum magnet; the disordered fully-connected quantum Heisenberg spin glass model. We consider (classical simulations of) QPE circuit computations on relatively small quantum Hamiltonians (333 qubits) with up to 101010 phase bits of precision, using up to Trotter order 101010. We systematically study the inputs of QPE, specifically time evolution, Trotter order, Trotter steps, and initial state, and illustrate how these inputs practically determine how QPE operates. From this we outline a coherent set of quantum algorithm input and tuning guidelines. One of the notable properties we characterize is that QPE sampling of the optimal digitized phase converges to a fixed rate. This results in strong diminishing returns of optimal phase sampling rates which can occur when the Trotter error is surprisingly high.
Quantum phase estimation (QPE) is fundamental to quantum algorithms for eigenvalue problems, chemistry simulation, and number-theoretic applications. However, canonical QPE implementations employ controlled unitary operations and quantum Fourier transform, incurring substantial circuit depth and control overhead that severely limit applicability on nearterm quantum hardware. This work develops a novel class of control-free phase estimation algorithms that eliminate both controlled unitaries and QFT by leveraging signal processing principles. Our approach applies uncontrolled powers of the unitary U = e −iHτ to an eigenstate or eigenstate-rich state, measures in multiple bases to capture interference patterns, and reconstructs eigenphases via classical post-processing techniques including Prony's method, compressed sensing, and harmonic inversion. We establish that for eigenstates or states with sparse eigendecomposition, our algorithms achieve phase estimation precision ϵ using Õ(1/ϵ) applications of U , matching standard QPE query complexity up to logarithmic factors while dramatically reducing circuit depth and eliminating control overhead. We provide detailed error analysis characterizing robustness to measurement noise, finite sampling, and state preparation errors. Applications to electronic structure estimation in small molecules and variational quantum eigensolvers demonstrate the practical viability of control-free QPE on both NISQ and early fault-tolerant quantum computers. Our results suggest that signal-processing-based phase estimation may offer more efficient implementations of quantum algorithms on realistic hardware.
Predicting the quantum resources for potential applications such as quantum chemistry plays a key role in the future development of quantum computers, and a systematic approach based on a reliable metric is needed for efficient resource estimation. In this work, we developed a Python software package QRE (Quantum Resource Estimator) for estimating quantum resources required to compute the properties of molecules. We define the key requirements for the quantum phase estimation (QPE) algorithm for molecules with different basis sets. We estimated the number of ancilla qubits, circuit depth, and time to solution. The input for QRE is the information about a molecule such as atom types, molecular geometries, charges, basis set, and level of theory. Also, we consider an error analysis scheme for QPE algorithm to calculate the number of ancilla qubits. As a part of the estimation, we calculate the number of rotation and CNOT gates for one Trotter step. Based on these results, the QRE program calculates costs for full QPE algorithms for the given gate time, fidelities of CNOT gates, and target success probability. It is expected that our work will contribute to a better understanding of the limitations of current and future quantum computers for quantum chemistry applications.
Quantum chemistry is envisioned as an early and disruptive application for quantum computers. Yet, closer scrutiny of the proposed algorithms shows that there are considerable difficulties along the way. Here, we propose two criteria for evaluating two leading quantum approaches for finding the ground state of molecules. The first criterion applies to the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm. It sets an upper bound to the level of imprecision/decoherence that can be tolerated in quantum hardware as a function of the targeted precision, the number of gates and the typical energy contribution from states populated by decoherence processes. We find that decoherence is highly detrimental to the accuracy of VQE and performing relevant chemistry calculations would require performances that are expected for fault-tolerant quantum computers, not mere noisy hardware, even with advanced error mitigation techniques. Physically, the sensitivity of VQE to decoherence originates from the fact that, in VQE, the spectrum of the studied molecule has no correlation with the spectrum of the quantum hardware used to perform the computation. The second criterion applies to the quantum phase estimation (QPE) algorithm, which is often presented as the go-to replacement of VQE upon availability of (noiseless) fault-tolerant quantum computers. QPE requires an input state with a large enough overlap with the sought-after ground state. We provide a criterion to estimate quantitatively this overlap based on the energy and the energy variance of said input state. Using input states from a variety of state-of-the-art classical methods, we show that the scaling of this overlap with system size does display the standard orthogonality catastrophe, namely an exponential suppression with system size. This in turns leads to an exponentially reduced QPE success probability.
Quantum phase estimation (QPE) is the workhorse behind any quantum algorithm and a promising method for determining ground state energies of strongly correlated quantum systems. Low-cost QPE techniques make use of circuits which only use a single ancilla qubit, requiring classical post-processing to extract eigenvalue details of the system. We investigate choices for phase estimation for a unitary matrix with low-depth noise-free or noisy circuits, varying both the phase estimation circuits themselves as well as the classical post-processing to determine the eigenvalue phases. We work in the scenario when the input state is not an eigenstate of the unitary matrix. We develop a new post-processing technique to extract eigenvalues from phase estimation data based on a classical time-series (or frequency) analysis and contrast this to an analysis via Bayesian methods. We calculate the variance in estimating single eigenvalues via the time-series analysis analytically, finding that it scales to first order in the number of experiments performed, and to first or second order (depending on the experiment design) in the circuit depth. Numerical simulations confirm this scaling for both estimators. We attempt to compensate for the noise with both classical post-processing techniques, finding good results in the presence of depolarizing noise, but smaller improvements in 9-qubit circuit-level simulations of superconducting qubits aimed at resolving the electronic ground state of a H 4 -molecule.