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.
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.
Scientific simulations demand methods combining scalability with predictive accuracy. Density Functional Theory (DFT) on High-Performance Computing (HPC) enables large-scale electronic-structure simulations but is limited by approximations affecting strongly correlated systems and band-gap predictions. Quantum computing offers a pathway to address this, though current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) hardware remains constrained by qubit resources, noise, and execution cost.
This work presents a hybrid DFT-Quantum Embedding (QDFT) framework integrating classical HPC-based DFT with a quantum electronic-structure solver. Large systems are partitioned to isolate a chemically relevant active space, treated via the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), while the remaining degrees of freedom are described by DFT. The framework incorporates active-space selection, embedded Hamiltonian construction, symmetry preservation, operator mapping, self-consistent density updating, and modular classical-quantum coupling.
We focus on noiseless quantum simulation to systematically evaluate accuracy, convergence, active-space dependence, computational cost, and HPC scalability without hardware noise. Detailed profiling identifies computational bottlenecks and highlights limitations of CPU-based quantum simulation. A QPU runtime-estimation methodology is additionally developed to assess execution requirements on actual quantum hardware.
Results demonstrate quantum embedding's potential to improve selected electronic-structure properties while retaining classical HPC's scalability. Noisy quantum simulation and QPU execution remain key future directions, providing a pathway toward practical, scalable HPC-quantum hybrid simulations as hardware matures.
In the near future, material and drug design may be aided by quantum computer assisted simulations. These have the potential to target chemical systems intractable by the most powerful classical computers. However, the resources offered by contemporary quantum computers are still limited, restricting the simulations to very simple molecules. In order to rapidly scale up to more interesting molecular systems, we propose the embedding of the quantum electronic structure calculation into a classically computed environment obtained at the Hartree-Fock (HF) or density functional theory (DFT) level of theory. This result is achieved by constructing an effective Hamiltonian that incorporates a mean field potential describing the action of the inactive electrons on a selected Active Space (AS). The ground state of the AS Hamiltonian is then determined by means of the variational quantum eigensolver algorithm. We show that with the proposed HF and DFT embedding schemes, we can obtain significant energy corrections to the reference HF and DFT calculations for a number of simple molecules in their strongly correlated limit (the dissociation regime) as well as for systems of the size of the oxirane molecule.
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.
Understanding strongly correlated systems is essential for advancing quantum chemistry and materials science, yet conventional methods like Density Functional Theory (DFT) often fail to capture their complex electronic behavior. To address these limitations, we develop a hybrid quantum-classical framework that integrates Multiconfigurational Self-Consistent Field (MCSCF) with the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE). Our initial benchmarks on water dissociation enabled the systematic optimization of key computational parameters, including ansatz selection, active space construction, and error mitigation. Building on this, we extend our approach to investigate the interactions between graphene analogues and water, demonstrating that our framework produces binding energies consistent with high-accuracy quantum methods. Furthermore, we apply this methodology to predict the binding energies of transition metals (Fe, Co, Ni) on both pristine and defective graphene analogues, revealing strong charge transfer effects and pronounced multireference character─phenomena often misrepresented by standard DFT. In contrast to many existing quantum algorithms that are constrained to small molecular systems, our framework achieves chemically accurate predictions for larger, strongly correlated systems such as metal-graphene complexes. This advancement highlights the capacity of hybrid quantum-classical approaches to address complex electronic interactions and demonstrates a practical route toward realizing quantum advantage for real-world materials applications in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era.
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.
Quantum computers (QC) could harbor the potential to significantly advance materials simulations, particularly at the atomistic scale involving strongly correlated fermionic systems, where an accurate description of quantum many-body effects scales unfavorably with size. While a full-scale treatment of condensed matter systems with currently available noisy quantum computers remains elusive, quantum embedding schemes like dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) allow the mapping of an effective, reduced subspace Hamiltonian to available devices to improve the accuracy of ab initio calculations such as density functional theory (DFT). Here, we report on the development of a hybrid quantum-classical DFT + DMFT simulation framework which relies on a quantum impurity solver based on the Lehmann representation of the impurity Green’s function. Hardware experiments with up to 14 qubits on the IBM Quantum system are conducted, using advanced error mitigation methods and a novel calibration scheme for an improved zero-noise extrapolation to effectively reduce adverse effects from inherent noise on current quantum devices. We showcase the utility of our quantum DFT + DMFT workflow by assessing the correlation effects on the electronic structure of a real material, Ca 2 CuO 2 Cl 2 , which is mapped to an effective single-band Hubbard Hamiltonian and the subsequently derived Anderson impurity model solved with up to 6 bath sites on available quantum hardware. Further, we carefully benchmark our quantum results with respect to exact reference solutions and experimental spectroscopy measurements. While challenges remain to scale our approach to larger, multi-orbital and multi-site systems with more bath sites, the present work marks an important milestone towards achieving utility-scale quantum computation in materials simulation.