While ground-state preparation is expected to be a primary application of quantum computers, it is also an essential subroutine for many fault-tolerant algorithms. In early fault-tolerant regimes, logical measurements remain costly, motivating adaptive, shot-frugal state-preparation strategies that efficiently utilize each measurement. We introduce the Shadow Enhanced Greedy Quantum Eigensolver (SEGQE) as a greedy, shadow-assisted framework for measurement-efficient ground-state preparation. SEGQE uses classical shadows to evaluate, in parallel and entirely in classical post-processing, the energy reduction induced by large collections of local candidate gates, greedily selecting at each step the gate with the largest estimated energy decrease. We derive rigorous worst-case per-iteration sample-complexity bounds for SEGQE, exhibiting logarithmic dependence on the number of candidate gates. Numerical benchmarks on finite transverse-field Ising models and ensembles of random local Hamiltonians demonstrate convergence in a number of iterations that scales approximately linearly with system size, while maintaining high-fidelity ground-state approximations and competitive energy estimates. Together, our empirical scaling laws and rigorous per-iteration guarantees establish SEGQE as a measurement-efficient state-preparation primitive well suited to early fault-tolerant quantum computing architectures.
While ground-state preparation is expected to be a primary application of quantum computers, it is also an essential subroutine for many fault-tolerant algorithms. In early fault-tolerant regimes, logical measurements remain costly, motivating adaptive, shot-frugal state-preparation strategies that efficiently utilize each measurement. We introduce the Shadow Enhanced Greedy Quantum Eigensolver (SEGQE) as a greedy, shadow-assisted framework for measurement-efficient ground-state preparation. SEGQE uses classical shadows to evaluate, in parallel and entirely in classical post-processing, the energy reduction induced by large collections of local candidate gates, greedily selecting at each step the gate with the largest estimated energy decrease. We derive rigorous worst-case per-iteration sample-complexity bounds for SEGQE, exhibiting logarithmic dependence on the number of candidate gates. Numerical benchmarks on finite transverse-field Ising models and ensembles of random local Hamiltonians demonstrate convergence in a number of iterations that scales approximately linearly with system size, while maintaining high-fidelity ground-state approximations and competitive energy estimates. Together, our empirical scaling laws and rigorous per-iteration guarantees establish SEGQE as a measurement-efficient state-preparation primitive well suited to early fault-tolerant quantum computing architectures.
Classical shadows enable us to learn many properties of a quantum state ρ with very few measurements. However, near-term and early fault-tolerant quantum computers will only be able to prepare noisy quantum states ρ and it is thus a considerable challenge to efficiently learn properties of an ideal, noise-free state ρ id . We consider error mitigation techniques, such as probabilistic error cancelation (PEC), zero noise extrapolation (ZNE), and symmetry verification (SV), which have been developed for mitigating errors in single expected value measurements and generalize them for mitigating errors in classical shadows. We find that PEC is the most natural candidate and thus develop a thorough theoretical framework for PEC shadows with the following rigorous theoretical guarantees: PEC shadows are an unbiased estimator for the ideal quantum state ρ id ; the sample complexity for simultaneously predicting many linear properties of ρ id is identical to that of the conventional shadows approach up to a multiplicative factor, which is the sample overhead due to error mitigation. Due to efficient postprocessing of shadows, this overhead does not depend directly on the number of qubits but rather grows exponentially with the number of noisy gates. The broad set of tools introduced in this work may be instrumental in exploiting near-term and early fault-tolerant quantum computers: we demonstrate in detailed numerical simulations a range of practical applications of quantum computers that will significantly benefit from our techniques. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We present a novel approach for efficient preparation of electronic ground states, leveraging the optimizer ExcitationSolve [Jäger et al., Comm. Phys. (2025)] and established variational quantum eigensolver-based operator selection methods, such as Energy Sorting (ES). By combining these tools, we demonstrate a computationally efficient protocol that enables the construction of an approximate ground state from a unitary coupled cluster ansatz via a single sweep over the operator pool. Utilizing efficient classical pre-processing to select the majority of relevant operators, this approach reduces the computational complexity associated with traditional variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) optimization methods. We further show that second-order Epstein-Nesbet (EN2) perturbation theory emerges as the first-order Taylor expansion of our protocol in terms of a correlation measure, clarifying why our approach provides a more robust initial guess for the ground state in strongly correlated regimes. We also find that second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation (MP2) theory, which is widely used for unitary coupled cluster (UCC) initialization, performs worse than both EN2 and our protocol. Furthermore, we show that our method can be seamlessly integrated with one-variational-parameter couple exchange operators, thereby further reducing the number of required CNOT operations. Overall, we empirically observe a quadratic convergence speedup beyond state-of-the-art methods, advancing the preparation of high-fidelity electronic ground states - one of the cornerstones of meaningful electronic structure calculations in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum computing (NISQ) era, and a prerequisite for fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) algorithms such as quantum phase estimation.
Hybrid quantum-classical adaptive Variational Quantum Eigensolvers (VQE) hold the potential to outperform classical computing for simulating many-body quantum systems. However, practical implementations on current quantum processing units (QPUs) are challenging due to the noisy evaluation of a polynomially scaling number of observables, undertaken for operator selection and high-dimensional cost function optimization. We introduce an adaptive algorithm using analytic, gradient-free optimization, called Greedy Gradient-free Adaptive VQE (GGA-VQE). In addition to demonstrating the algorithm's improved resilience to statistical sampling noise in the computation of simple molecular ground states, we execute GGA-VQE on a 25-qubit error-mitigated QPU by computing the ground state of a 25-body Ising model. Although hardware noise on the QPU produces inaccurate energies, our implementation outputs a parameterized quantum circuit yielding a favorable ground-state approximation. We demonstrate this by retrieving the parameterized operators calculated on the QPU and evaluating the resulting ansatz wave-function via noiseless emulation (i.e., hybrid observable measurement).
Reliable preparation of many-body ground states is an essential task in quantum computing, with applications spanning areas from chemistry and materials modeling to quantum optimization and benchmarking. A variety of approaches have been proposed to tackle this problem, including variational methods. However, variational training often struggle to navigate complex energy landscapes, frequently encountering suboptimal local minima or suffering from barren plateaus. In this work, we introduce an iterative strategy for ground-state preparation based on a stepwise (discretized) Hamiltonian deformation. By complementing the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) with adiabatic principles, we demonstrate that solving a sequence of intermediate problems facilitates tracking the ground-state manifold toward the target system, even as we scale the system size. We provide a rigorous theoretical foundation for this approach, proving a lower bound on the loss variance that suggests trainability throughout the deformation, provided the system remains away from gap closings. Numerical simulations, including the effects of shot noise, confirm that this path-dependent tracking consistently converges to the target ground state.
We present a shadow-tomography-enhanced nonorthogonal quantum eigensolver (NOQE) for more efficient and accurate electronic structure calculations on near-term quantum devices. By integrating shadow tomography into the NOQE, the measurement cost scales linearly rather than quadratically with the number of reference states, while also reducing the required qubits and circuit depth by half. This approach enables extraction of all matrix elements via randomized measurements and classical postprocessing. We analyze its sample complexity and show that, for small systems, it remains constant in the high-precision regime, while for larger systems, it scales linearly with the system size. We further apply shadow-based error mitigation to suppress noise-induced bias without increasing quantum resources. Demonstrations on the hydrogen molecule in the strongly correlated regime achieve chemical accuracy under realistic noise, showing that our method is both resource-efficient and noise-resilient for practical quantum chemistry simulations in the near term.
We investigate the feasibility of early fault-tolerant quantum algorithms focusing on ground-state energy estimation problems. In particular, we examine the computation of the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the spectral measure of a Hamiltonian and the identification of its discontinuities. Scaling these methods to larger system sizes reveals three key challenges: the smoothness of the CDF for large supports, the lack of tight lower bounds on the overlap with the true ground state, and the difficulty of preparing high-quality initial states. To address these challenges, we propose a signal processing approach to find these estimates automatically, in the regime where the quality of the initial state is unknown. Rather than aiming for exact ground-state energy, we advocate for improving classical estimates by targeting the low-energy support of the initial state. Additionally, we provide quantitative resource estimates, demonstrating a constant factor improvement in the number of samples required to detect a specified change in CDF. Our numerical experiments, conducted on a 26-qubit fully connected Heisenberg model, leverage a truncated density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) initial state with a low bond dimension. The results show that the predictions from the quantum algorithm align closely with the DMRG-converged energies at larger bond dimensions while requiring several orders of magnitude fewer samples than theoretical estimates suggest. These findings underscore that CDF-based quantum algorithms are a practical and resource-efficient alternative to quantum phase estimation, particularly in resource-constrained scenarios.