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arXiv:2607.27777

Resource-efficient quantum-selected configuration interaction for molecular properties

Suprava Sahoo, Abdul Kalam, Kenji Sugisaki, V. S. Prasannaa, B. P. Das

quant-phphysics.atom-phphysics.chem-phSubmitted Jul 30, 2026• Announced Jul 31, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

The quantum-selected configuration interaction identifies important determinantal basis functions through real-time evolution of a reference wavefunction and diagonalizing the Hamiltonian matrix in the resulting selected subspace. However, implementing the full electronic Hamiltonian on noisy quantum devices leads to rapidly increasing circuit complexity, limiting its scalability. To address this issue, we identify the dominant fermionic excitation operators and perform reference-state fidelity loss analysis to construct a compact Hamiltonian, reducing computational overhead while retaining high precision. Applied to Group IIIA monofluorides (BF, AlF, GaF, InF, and TlF), the proposed framework achieves a near-quadratic improvement in Hamiltonian-term scaling, enabling resource-efficient simulations. We employ this framework to compute the relativistic ground-state energies and permanent electric dipole moments (PDMs) of the systems under consideration. After validating the framework via simulations, we demonstrate hardware execution for AlF and TlF on the IBM Marrakesh processor using active spaces of up to 20 qubits. For a 20-qubit TlF system, the reduced Hamiltonian yields a reduction of higher than $ 98\%$ in both circuit depth and two-qubit gate counts, with the resulting PDMs from quantum hardware matching complete active space configuration interaction values within $99.99\%$. These results demonstrate the scalability of this approach on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.

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Applications of quantum simulation algorithms to obtain electronic energies of molecules on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices require careful consideration of resources describing the complex electron correlation effects. In modeling second-quantized problems, the biggest challenge confronted is that the number of qubits scales linearly with the size of the molecular basis. This poses a significant limitation on the size of the basis sets and the number of correlated electrons included in quantum simulations of chemical processes. To address this issue and enable more realistic simulations on NISQ computers, we employ the double unitary coupled-cluster (DUCC) method to effectively downfold correlation effects into the reduced-size orbital space, commonly referred to as the active space. Using downfolding techniques, we demonstrate that properly constructed effective Hamiltonians can capture the effect of the whole orbital space in small-size active spaces. Combining the downfolding preprocessing technique with the variational quantum eigensolver, we solve for the ground-state energy of H 2, Li 2, and BeH 2 in the cc-pVTZ basis using the DUCC-reduced active spaces. We compare these results to full configuration-interaction and high-level coupled-cluster reference calculations.

arXiv:2004.07721•Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation•Sep 11, 2020•78 citations
The quantum-selected configuration interaction identifies important determinantal basis functions through real-time evolution of a reference wavefunction and diagonalizing the Hamiltonian matrix in the resulting selected subspace. However, implementing the full electronic Hamiltonian on noisy quantum devices leads to rapidly increasing circuit complexity, limiting its scalability. To address this issue, we identify the dominant fermionic excitation operators and perform reference-state fidelity loss analysis to construct a compact Hamiltonian, reducing computational overhead while retaining high precision. Applied to Group IIIA monofluorides (BF, AlF, GaF, InF, and TlF), the proposed framework achieves a near-quadratic improvement in Hamiltonian-term scaling, enabling resource-efficient simulations. We employ this framework to compute the relativistic ground-state energies and permanent electric dipole moments (PDMs) of the systems under consideration. After validating the framework via simulations, we demonstrate hardware execution for AlF and TlF on the IBM Marrakesh processor using active spaces of up to 20 qubits. For a 20-qubit TlF system, the reduced Hamiltonian yields a reduction of higher than 98% 98\%98% in both circuit depth and two-qubit gate counts, with the resulting PDMs from quantum hardware matching complete active space configuration interaction values within 99.99%99.99\%99.99%. These results demonstrate the scalability of this approach on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.
Quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI) has emerged as a feasible approach for approximating electronic ground states on noisy quantum devices toward large-system demonstrations. In QSCI, Slater determinants are sampled from a quantum-prepared state, and the Hamiltonian is then diagonalized in the sampled subspace. To create a high-quality subspace under hardware constraints, the design of the state-preparation circuit is crucial. Here, we present a Generative Quantum Eigensolver (GQE)-based framework that optimizes ansatz structures using a Transformer policy trained on the QSCI subspace energy. We validate the framework on N2 in active spaces of up to 32 qubits. We found that the optimized circuits reach chemical precision with substantially lower gate counts than time-evolved circuits. Quantitatively, this corresponds to an average reduction of 98% in the required two-qubit gate count relative to the single-step first-order Trotterized approximation and 83% relative to the qDRIFT approximation. Furthermore, the resulting wavefunctions are competitive with heat-bath configuration interaction (HCI) in terms of compactness. In stretched-bond, strongly correlated regimes, they achieve chemical precision with subspaces that are 50% smaller than those required by HCI.
Quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI) is an approach for quantum chemical calculations using current quantum computers. In conventional QSCI, Slater determinants used for the wave function expansion are sampled by iteratively performing approximate wave function preparation and subsequent measurement in the computational basis, and then the subspace Hamiltonian matrix is diagonalized on a classical computer. In this approach, preparation of a high-quality approximate wave function is necessary to accurately compute total energies. Here we propose a Hamiltonian simulation-based QSCI (HSB-QSCI) to avoid this difficulty, by sampling the Slater determinants from quantum states generated by the real-time evolution of approximate wave functions. We provide numerical simulations for the lowest spin-singlet and triplet states of oligoacenes (benzene, naphthalene, and anthracene), phenylene-1,4-dinitrene, and hexa-1,2,3,4,5-pentaene. We found that the HSB-QSCI is applicable not only to molecules where the Hartree-Fock provides a good approximation of the ground state, but also to strongly correlated systems where preparing a high-quality approximate wave function is hard. Hardware demonstrations of the HSB-QSCI are also reported for carbyne molecules expressed by up to 36 qubits, using an IBM quantum processor. The HSB-QSCI captures more than 99.18% of the correlation energies in the active space by considering about 1% of all the Slater determinants in 36 qubit systems, illustrating the ability of the proposed method to efficiently consider important electronic configurations.
Predicting many molecular properties requires accurate ground-state energies of molecular Hamiltonians. Quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI) obtains such energies by measuring an input state to select important electronic configurations and classically diagonalizing the Hamiltonian in the subspace they span. ADAPT-QSCI, an adaptive extension of QSCI, improves the input state through iterative circuit growth. For single-reference molecules, the sampling distribution is dominated by the Hartree-Fock (HF) configuration, so most measurements reproduce a configuration already known. We reduce this redundancy by placing the HF configuration in the diagonalization subspace classically, before any measurement. This invalidates the operator-selection criterion of ADAPT-QSCI, and we derive a consistent replacement with energy and gradient in closed form, adding no query to the quantum device. At the per-iteration shot budgets previously used for ADAPT-QSCI, the proposed scheme reaches chemical accuracy with approximately 63%63\%63% and 43%43\%43% of the CNOT gates for H4\mathrm{H}_4H4​ and H6\mathrm{H}_6H6​, and 44%44\%44% and 40%40\%40% of the total shots. The advantage depends on the budget, however: in the infinite-shot limit the H4\mathrm{H}_4H4​ CNOT count increases to 125%125\%125% of that of ADAPT-QSCI. These results identify the per-iteration shot budget as a key design variable governing resource savings in QSCI-based algorithms.
Accurate determination of ground-state energies for molecules remains a challenge in quantum chemistry and a cornerstone for progress in fields such as drug discovery and materials design. The Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) represents a leading hybrid quantum-classical paradigm for addressing this challenge; however, its widespread realization is limited by noise and the restricted scalability of current quantum hardware. Achieving efficient simulations on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices and forthcoming Fault-Tolerant Application-Scalable Quantum (FASQ) systems demands a detailed understanding of how computational resources scale with molecular complexity and fermion-to-qubit encodings. In this study, resource requirements for VQE implementations employing the Unitary Coupled Cluster Singles and Doubles (UCCSD) ansatz are systematically analyzed. The molecular Hamiltonian is formulated in second quantization and mapped to qubit operators through the Jordan-Wigner (JW), Bravyi-Kitaev (BK), and Parity (Pa) transformations. Hamiltonian reduction strategies, including Z2\mathbb{Z}_2Z2​ tapering and frozen-core approximations, are examined to assess their effect on quantum resource scaling. The analysis reveals that appropriate transformations, when combined with symmetry-based reductions, can substantially reduce qubit counts by up to ≈50%\approx 50\%≈50% and quantum gate counts by up to ≈27.5×\approx 27.5\times≈27.5× and Hamiltonian Pauli string counts by up to ≈2.75×\approx 2.75\times≈2.75×, relative to the corresponding unreduced Hamiltonian representations within the same active-space configuration for the representative set of molecular systems under study. These findings provide practical circuit-level insights for executing chemically relevant simulations on NISQ hardware, while establishing physical-resource baselines that may inform future logical-level analyses targeting FASQ systems.
We propose quantum-selected configuration interaction, a class of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for calculating the ground- and excited-state energies of many-electron Hamiltonians on noisy quantum devices. Suppose that an approximate ground state can be prepared on a quantum computer either by variational quantum eigensolver or by some other method. Then, by sampling the state in the computational basis, which is hard for classical computation in general, one can identify the electron configurations that are important for reproducing the ground state. The Hamiltonian in the subspace spanned by those important configurations is diagonalized on classical computers to output the ground-state energy and the corresponding eigenvector. The excited-state energies can be obtained similarly. The result is robust against statistical and physical errors because the noisy quantum devices are used only to define the subspace, and the resulting ground-state energy strictly satisfies the variational principle even in the presence of such errors. The expectation values of various other operators can also be estimated for obtained eigenstates with no additional quantum cost, since the explicit eigenvectors in the subspaces are known. We verified our proposal by numerical simulations and demonstrated it on a quantum device for an eight-qubit molecular Hamiltonian. The proposed algorithms are potentially feasible to tackle some challenging molecules by exploiting quantum devices with several tens of qubits, assisted by high-performance classical computing resources for diagonalization.
Applications of quantum simulation algorithms to obtain electronic energies of molecules on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices require careful consideration of resources describing the complex electron correlation effects. In modeling second-quantized problems, the biggest challenge confronted is that the number of qubits scales linearly with the size of the molecular basis. This poses a significant limitation on the size of the basis sets and the number of correlated electrons included in quantum simulations of chemical processes. To address this issue and enable more realistic simulations on NISQ computers, we employ the double unitary coupled-cluster (DUCC) method to effectively downfold correlation effects into the reduced-size orbital space, commonly referred to as the active space. Using downfolding techniques, we demonstrate that properly constructed effective Hamiltonians can capture the effect of the whole orbital space in small-size active spaces. Combining the downfolding preprocessing technique with the variational quantum eigensolver, we solve for the ground-state energy of H 2, Li 2, and BeH 2 in the cc-pVTZ basis using the DUCC-reduced active spaces. We compare these results to full configuration-interaction and high-level coupled-cluster reference calculations.