The Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) and its adaptive variants, such as ADAPT-VQE, are central to the study of strongly correlated quantum systems. However, the classical simulation of the ansatz growth process remains constrained by the exponential scaling of operator space and the associated computational cost of unitary evolution. We introduce the Greedy Operator Commutativity Partitioning (GOCP) framework, an analytical methodology designed to optimize both operator selection and state evolution. By reformulating complex unitary rotations as a chained sequence of fifth-order O(5) Taylor series expansions, GOCP bypasses the need for explicit matrix exponentiation, reducing the computational task to a sequence of sparse matrix-vector operations. We evaluate the performance of this framework across diverse molecular systems, including BeH2 and strongly correlated H2O geometries, utilizing both Jordan-Wigner and Bravyi-Kitaev mappings. Our results demonstrate that the GOCP framework maintains exceptional numerical fidelity-exceeding 1 - 10^-6 in state fidelity-while achieving sub-chemical accuracy in ground-state energy calculations. By enabling the simulation of operator manifolds exceeding 2.68 x 10^8 elements with high efficiency, this approach provides a scalable and rigorous pathway for exploring deep variational circuits in complex quantum many-body systems.
The Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) and its adaptive variants, such as ADAPT-VQE, are central to the study of strongly correlated quantum systems. However, the classical simulation of the ansatz growth process remains constrained by the exponential scaling of operator space and the associated computational cost of unitary evolution. We introduce the Greedy Operator Commutativity Partitioning (GOCP) framework, an analytical methodology designed to optimize both operator selection and state evolution. By reformulating complex unitary rotations as a chained sequence of fifth-order O(5) Taylor series expansions, GOCP bypasses the need for explicit matrix exponentiation, reducing the computational task to a sequence of sparse matrix-vector operations. We evaluate the performance of this framework across diverse molecular systems, including BeH2 and strongly correlated H2O geometries, utilizing both Jordan-Wigner and Bravyi-Kitaev mappings. Our results demonstrate that the GOCP framework maintains exceptional numerical fidelity-exceeding 1 - 10^-6 in state fidelity-while achieving sub-chemical accuracy in ground-state energy calculations. By enabling the simulation of operator manifolds exceeding 2.68 x 10^8 elements with high efficiency, this approach provides a scalable and rigorous pathway for exploring deep variational circuits in complex quantum many-body systems.
The Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) is a leading algorithm for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, but its adaptive variants (e.g., ADAPT-VQE) suffer from severe classical simulation bottlenecks during the ansatz growth phase. Representing and exponentiating pool operators for multi-qubit systems constructs massive sparse matrices that quickly scale to millions of elements, choking classical memory bandwidth and CPU/GPU cycle capacity. In this work, we present a resource-efficient software-layer framework that completely bypasses dense matrix exponentiation by evaluating state updates through a deterministic fifth-order (O(5)) Taylor series expansion. This approach reframes the costly unitary evolution into a chained sequence of five lightweight, successive sparse matrix-vector multiplications scaling strictly as O(Nz), where Nz is the number of non-zero elements. We validate our framework using equilibrium BeH2 (14 qubits), equilibrium H2O (12 qubits), and strongly correlated asymmetrically stretched H2O molecular profiles under both Jordan-Wigner (JW) and Bravyi-Kitaev (BK) transformations. The simulation results demonstrate that the O(5) truncation maintains exceptional numerical fidelity, retaining a state fidelity > 0.999999 and matching absolute ground state energies down to subchemical accuracy, while effortlessly navigating matrix spaces exceeding 268 million structural elements. This framework provides a scalable, high-performance pathway for executing deep variational simulations on hardware platforms with constrained computational budgets.
The seamless integration of Density Functional Theory (DFT) with quantum variational algorithms is essential for the predictive simulation of strongly correlated materials. In this work, we present an end-to-end computational pipeline - comprising DFT geometry relaxation, non-self-consistent field (NSCF) calculations, and Wannier-based orbital localization - to prepare active-space Hamiltonians for quantum embedding. We utilize the Adaptive Variational Quantum Eigensolver (ADAPT-VQE) framework, significantly enhanced by a Greedy-Operator Commutativity Partitioning (GOCP) approach and a Taylor-expanded O(5) operator evolution strategy to efficiently manage the exponential scaling of the Hilbert space. We demonstrate this framework through a systematic benchmark study of Li-hBN, mapping the system onto qubit registers and investigating the convergence behavior as the active space is expanded from 8 to 14 spatial orbitals. Our results quantify the relationship between active-space size and computational demand, identifying a critical "scaling wall" where classical simulation costs transition from manageable to intractable. This study provides a rigorous performance baseline for the DFT-to-ADAPT-VQE workflow and offers empirical insights into the memory and processing limits currently facing hybrid quantum-classical architectures using advanced co-processing strategies.
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).
Fixed-ansatz Variational Quantum Eigensolvers (VQE), such as the Unitary Coupled Cluster with Singles and Doubles (UCCSD) framework, frequently suffer from severe initialization paralyzation and zero-gradient traps when evaluated using the non-local Bravyi-Kitaev (BK) fermion-to-qubit mapping. In this work, we systematically demonstrate how the Adaptive Derivative-Assembled Pseudo-Trotter (ADAPT-VQE) framework shatters these structural limitations across three distinct electronic and geometric molecular pillars: Lithium Hydride (LiH), Hydrogen Fluoride (HF), and Water (H2O), under heavily stretched or asymmetric multi-reference configurations. While conventional UCCSD-VQE flatlines completely at a zero energy shift (0.000000~Ha) due to global phase cancellations inherent to the BK tree structures, our dynamic ADAPT-VQE loop successfully isolates the dominant symmetry-breaking operators using analytical commutator gradients. To bypass the severe O(N3) computational bottlenecks of dense matrix exponentiation and Singular Value Decomposition on larger registers, we implement a highly optimized, vector-based Taylor series expansion state-evolution engine. Our numerical results show that the accelerated ADAPT-VQE framework achieves instant, exact Full Configuration Interaction (FCI) convergence within the very first macro-cycle across all three molecular systems, maintaining absolute numerical stability up to a 12-qubit register space. This study establishes a robust, hardware-efficient path for simulating strongly correlated, highly polarized triatomic chemical environments on near-term local architectures.
Simulating strongly correlated molecular systems on near-term quantum hardware remains challenging because current hardware offers limited quantum volume and moderate-fidelity qubits. One way to address this challenge is through bootstrap embedding (BE). Bootstrap embedding partitions molecules into smaller fragments that are then embedded in the ``bath'' of other fragments iteratively. Bootstrap embedding is appealing for quantum simulation because fragmentation reduces the qubit requirements of each fragment problem. In this work, we develop a quantum bootstrap embedding (QBE) workflow that uses variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) fragment solvers and examines the algorithmic choices that determine the success of the overall VQE-QBE procedure. To improve efficiency, we introduce FastAdaptVQE, a sparse-matrix-accelerated form of the adaptive variational quantum eigensolver (ADAPT-VQE) that replaces symbolic commutator evaluation with direct statevector calculations, and MatrixFreeAdaptVQE, a matrix-free extension that removes the sparse-matrix memory bottleneck that arises for larger fragments. We also explore modifying the ADAPT-VQE operator-selection step by replacing the purely greedy choice with a lookahead strategy. Benchmarks on H4, F2, and selected geometries of H6 reach chemical accuracy, within 1 kcal/mol of BE results obtained with a full configuration interaction (FCI) solver. For n-butane, density-matching residuals converged, but energy errors remained outside chemical accuracy. These results show that combining QBE with VQE can accurately compute molecular energies, while density convergence alone does not ensure energy accuracy. This work lays the foundation for extending these energy calculations to larger molecular systems and quantum materials on near-term quantum hardware.
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.