Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2608.12830

Improved Measurement Cost Scaling in the Nonorthogonal Quantum Eigensolver

Mingyu Kang, K. Birgitta Whaley

quant-phSubmitted Aug 13, 2026• Announced Aug 14, 2026• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum subspace diagonalization methods are promising algorithms for quantum chemistry on near-term quantum computers. These methods can estimate low-lying energies of molecular systems using shallow quantum circuits, at the cost of many circuit repetitions to estimate the projected matrix elements. Errors in these matrix elements can be converted into much larger eigenvalue errors by an ill-conditioned overlap matrix. We study this bottleneck for the nonorthogonal quantum eigensolver (NOQE), which constructs a compact multireference subspace from dressed unrestricted Hartree-Fock states. We prove a finite-shot perturbation bound showing that, after overlap thresholding, the eigenvalue sensitivity is controlled by the condition number of the retained overlap matrix rather than by a worst-case dimension factor. With a scalable thresholding scheme, the upper bound on the per-matrix-element shot count required to reach a target accuracy scales as $\mathcal{O}(M)$, improving on the previously known $\mathcal{O}(M^3)$ bound, where $M$ is the number of reference states. Numerical experiments on hydrogen chains and rings suggest that, in practice, the measurement cost of structured NOQE instances can grow even more slowly than this linear bound.

Comments
8 pages, 2 figures. Open-source codes in https://github.com/mkangquantum/noqe

Related papers

Error-mitigated nonorthogonal quantum eigensolver via shadow tomography

Hang Ren, Yipei Zhang, W.M. Billings +5 more

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.

arXiv:2504.16008•Physical Review Research•Dec 30, 2025•1 citation

Towards Heisenberg Scaling: Measurement-Efficient Non-Orthogonal Quantum Eigensolver

Hang Ren, Yipei Zhang, Thilo Scharnhorst +1 more

The Non-Orthogonal Quantum Eigensolver (NOQE) provides an accurate framework for electronic-structure calculations, but the estimation of its Hamiltonian and overlap matrix elements relies on sampling and requires $O(1/\varepsilon^2)$ circuit repetitions to achieve additive precision $\varepsilon$. Here, we reformulate this matrix-element estimation step as a collection of amplitude-estimation tasks and integrate iterative quantum amplitude estimation into the NOQE workflow. The resulting protocol achieves near-Heisenberg query complexity $O(1/\varepsilon)$ for these estimation tasks, by replacing incoherent statistical averaging with coherent amplitude amplification. We present explicit circuit constructions and the corresponding implementation procedure. Numerical simulations for the electronic states of the hydrogen molecule show that the proposed method reaches chemical accuracy with substantially fewer total queries than the original sampling-based protocol. Overall, this work provides a measurement-efficient route to high-precision energy estimation and illustrates how sampling-limited quantum algorithms can be systematically reformulated to leverage quantum coherence and achieve lower measurement costs.

quant-pharXiv:2606.01589•Jun 2, 2026•0 citations

Say NO to Optimization: A Nonorthogonal Quantum Eigensolver

Unpil Baek, Diptarka Hait, James Shee +5 more

A balanced description of both static and dynamic correlations in electronic systems with nearly degenerate low-lying states presents a challenge for multiconfigurational methods on classical computers.We present here a quantum algorithm utilizing the action of correlating cluster operators to provide highquality wave-function ansätze employing a nonorthogonal multireference basis that captures a significant portion of the exact wave function in a highly compact manner and that allows computation of the resulting energies and wave functions at polynomial cost with a quantum computer.This enables a significant improvement over the corresponding classical nonorthogonal solver, which incurs an exponential cost when evaluating off-diagonal matrix elements between the ansatz states and is therefore intractable.We implement the nonorthogonal quantum eigensolver (NOQE) here with an efficient ansatz parametrization inspired by classical quantum chemistry methods that succeed in capturing significant amounts of electronic correlation accurately.Crucially, we avoid the need to perform any optimization of the ansatz on the quantum device.By taking advantage of such classical approaches, NOQE provides a flexible, compact, and rigorous description of both static and dynamic electronic correlation, making it an attractive method for the calculation of electronic states of a wide range of molecular systems.

arXiv:2205.09039•PRX Quantum•Jul 17, 2023•47 citations

A non-orthogonal variational quantum eigensolver

Huggins, WJ, Lee, J, Baek, U +2 more

Variational algorithms for strongly correlated chemical and materials systems are one of the most promising applications of near-term quantum computers. We present an extension to the variational quantum eigensolver that approximates the ground state of a system by solving a generalized eigenvalue problem in a subspace spanned by a collection of parametrized quantum states. This allows for the systematic improvement of a logical wavefunction ansatz without a significant increase in circuit complexity. To minimize the circuit complexity of this approach, we propose a strategy for efficiently measuring the Hamiltonian and overlap matrix elements between states parametrized by circuits that commute with the total particle number operator. This strategy doubles the size of the state preparation circuits but not their depth, while adding a small number of additional two-qubit gates relative to standard variational quantum eigensolver. We also propose a classical Monte Carlo scheme to estimate the uncertainty in the ground state energy caused by a finite number of measurements of the matrix elements. We explain how this Monte Carlo procedure can be extended to adaptively schedule the required measurements, reducing the number of circuit executions necessary for a given accuracy. We apply these ideas to two model strongly correlated systems, a square configuration of H4 and the π-system of hexatriene (C6H8).

•Jul 1, 2020•128 citations

A New Angle on Quantum Subspace Diagonalization for Quantum Chemistry

Xeno De Vriendt, Jacob Bringewatt, Nik O. Gjonbalaj +5 more

Quantum subspace diagonalization and quantum Krylov algorithms offer a feasible, pre- or early-fault tolerant alternative to quantum phase estimation for using quantum computers to estimate the low-lying spectra of quantum systems. However, despite promising proof-of-principle results, such methods suffer from high sensitivity to noise (including intrinsic sources such as sampling noise), making their utility for realistic industry-relevant problems an open question. To improve the potential applicability of such methods, we introduce a new variant of thresholding for noisy generalized eigenvalue problems that arise in quantum subspace diagonalization that has the potential to better control sensitivity to noise. Our approach leverages eigenvector-preserving transformations (rotations) of the generalized eigenvalue problem prior to thresholding. We study this effect in practical settings by applying this rotation thresholding scheme to an iterative quantum Krylov algorithm for several chemical systems, including the industry-relevant Fe(III)-NTA chelate complex. We develop a particular heuristic to select the rotation angle from noisy data and find for certain systems and noise regimes that the samples required to reach a target error for ground state estimation can be reduced by a factor of up to 100. Furthermore, with oracle access to the optimal transformation, more dramatic improvements are possible and we observe reductions in sample requirements by up to $10^4$, motivating the continued development of methods that can realize these improvements in practice. While we develop our approach in the context of quantum subspace diagonalization, the improved thresholding scheme we develop could be advantageous in any context where one must solve noisy, ill-conditioned generalized eigenvalue problems.

quant-pharXiv:2602.11985•Feb 13, 2026•0 citations

Mirror subspace diagonalization: A real-time quantum Krylov algorithm with near-optimal sampling cost

Shota Kanasugi, Yuya O. Nakagawa, Norifumi Matsumoto +3 more

Quantum Krylov algorithms are a promising approach for ground-state energy estimation on near-term quantum computers. However, their sampling cost is inherently high because each Hamiltonian term is measured individually. Despite various mitigation techniques, this overhead remains a bottleneck for large-scale electronic structure problems. We introduce mirror subspace diagonalization (MSD), which approaches the theoretical lower bound on the sampling cost for quantum Krylov algorithms built upon real-time evolution. MSD uses a finite-difference formula to express the Hamiltonian as a linear combination of time-evolution unitaries with symmetrically shifted timesteps, enabling efficient estimation of the Hamiltonian matrix within the Krylov subspace. By optimizing the timestep and shifting the energy spectrum, finite-difference and statistical errors are minimized simultaneously, allowing MSD to attain the sampling-cost lower bound up to a logarithmic factor. We further apply classical post-processing to infer Hamiltonian moments, which mitigate the ground-state energy error via the Lanczos scheme. Our analysis shows MSD is particularly effective when the Hamiltonian's spectral norm is much smaller than its 1-norm, as in high-accuracy molecular simulations with large basis sets and strong electronic correlations. Numerical results for various molecular models show sampling-cost reductions of roughly 10 to 10,000 times over the conventional quantum Krylov algorithm.

quant-pharXiv:2511.20998•npj Quantum Information•Nov 27, 2025•0 citations
Quantum subspace diagonalization methods are promising algorithms for quantum chemistry on near-term quantum computers. These methods can estimate low-lying energies of molecular systems using shallow quantum circuits, at the cost of many circuit repetitions to estimate the projected matrix elements. Errors in these matrix elements can be converted into much larger eigenvalue errors by an ill-conditioned overlap matrix. We study this bottleneck for the nonorthogonal quantum eigensolver (NOQE), which constructs a compact multireference subspace from dressed unrestricted Hartree-Fock states. We prove a finite-shot perturbation bound showing that, after overlap thresholding, the eigenvalue sensitivity is controlled by the condition number of the retained overlap matrix rather than by a worst-case dimension factor. With a scalable thresholding scheme, the upper bound on the per-matrix-element shot count required to reach a target accuracy scales as O(M)\mathcal{O}(M)O(M), improving on the previously known O(M3)\mathcal{O}(M^3)O(M3) bound, where MMM is the number of reference states. Numerical experiments on hydrogen chains and rings suggest that, in practice, the measurement cost of structured NOQE instances can grow even more slowly than this linear bound.
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.
The Non-Orthogonal Quantum Eigensolver (NOQE) provides an accurate framework for electronic-structure calculations, but the estimation of its Hamiltonian and overlap matrix elements relies on sampling and requires O(1/ε2)O(1/\varepsilon^2)O(1/ε2) circuit repetitions to achieve additive precision ε\varepsilonε. Here, we reformulate this matrix-element estimation step as a collection of amplitude-estimation tasks and integrate iterative quantum amplitude estimation into the NOQE workflow. The resulting protocol achieves near-Heisenberg query complexity O(1/ε)O(1/\varepsilon)O(1/ε) for these estimation tasks, by replacing incoherent statistical averaging with coherent amplitude amplification. We present explicit circuit constructions and the corresponding implementation procedure. Numerical simulations for the electronic states of the hydrogen molecule show that the proposed method reaches chemical accuracy with substantially fewer total queries than the original sampling-based protocol. Overall, this work provides a measurement-efficient route to high-precision energy estimation and illustrates how sampling-limited quantum algorithms can be systematically reformulated to leverage quantum coherence and achieve lower measurement costs.
A balanced description of both static and dynamic correlations in electronic systems with nearly degenerate low-lying states presents a challenge for multiconfigurational methods on classical computers.We present here a quantum algorithm utilizing the action of correlating cluster operators to provide highquality wave-function ansätze employing a nonorthogonal multireference basis that captures a significant portion of the exact wave function in a highly compact manner and that allows computation of the resulting energies and wave functions at polynomial cost with a quantum computer.This enables a significant improvement over the corresponding classical nonorthogonal solver, which incurs an exponential cost when evaluating off-diagonal matrix elements between the ansatz states and is therefore intractable.We implement the nonorthogonal quantum eigensolver (NOQE) here with an efficient ansatz parametrization inspired by classical quantum chemistry methods that succeed in capturing significant amounts of electronic correlation accurately.Crucially, we avoid the need to perform any optimization of the ansatz on the quantum device.By taking advantage of such classical approaches, NOQE provides a flexible, compact, and rigorous description of both static and dynamic electronic correlation, making it an attractive method for the calculation of electronic states of a wide range of molecular systems.
Variational algorithms for strongly correlated chemical and materials systems are one of the most promising applications of near-term quantum computers. We present an extension to the variational quantum eigensolver that approximates the ground state of a system by solving a generalized eigenvalue problem in a subspace spanned by a collection of parametrized quantum states. This allows for the systematic improvement of a logical wavefunction ansatz without a significant increase in circuit complexity. To minimize the circuit complexity of this approach, we propose a strategy for efficiently measuring the Hamiltonian and overlap matrix elements between states parametrized by circuits that commute with the total particle number operator. This strategy doubles the size of the state preparation circuits but not their depth, while adding a small number of additional two-qubit gates relative to standard variational quantum eigensolver. We also propose a classical Monte Carlo scheme to estimate the uncertainty in the ground state energy caused by a finite number of measurements of the matrix elements. We explain how this Monte Carlo procedure can be extended to adaptively schedule the required measurements, reducing the number of circuit executions necessary for a given accuracy. We apply these ideas to two model strongly correlated systems, a square configuration of H4 and the π-system of hexatriene (C6H8).
Quantum subspace diagonalization and quantum Krylov algorithms offer a feasible, pre- or early-fault tolerant alternative to quantum phase estimation for using quantum computers to estimate the low-lying spectra of quantum systems. However, despite promising proof-of-principle results, such methods suffer from high sensitivity to noise (including intrinsic sources such as sampling noise), making their utility for realistic industry-relevant problems an open question. To improve the potential applicability of such methods, we introduce a new variant of thresholding for noisy generalized eigenvalue problems that arise in quantum subspace diagonalization that has the potential to better control sensitivity to noise. Our approach leverages eigenvector-preserving transformations (rotations) of the generalized eigenvalue problem prior to thresholding. We study this effect in practical settings by applying this rotation thresholding scheme to an iterative quantum Krylov algorithm for several chemical systems, including the industry-relevant Fe(III)-NTA chelate complex. We develop a particular heuristic to select the rotation angle from noisy data and find for certain systems and noise regimes that the samples required to reach a target error for ground state estimation can be reduced by a factor of up to 100. Furthermore, with oracle access to the optimal transformation, more dramatic improvements are possible and we observe reductions in sample requirements by up to 10410^4104, motivating the continued development of methods that can realize these improvements in practice. While we develop our approach in the context of quantum subspace diagonalization, the improved thresholding scheme we develop could be advantageous in any context where one must solve noisy, ill-conditioned generalized eigenvalue problems.
Quantum Krylov algorithms are a promising approach for ground-state energy estimation on near-term quantum computers. However, their sampling cost is inherently high because each Hamiltonian term is measured individually. Despite various mitigation techniques, this overhead remains a bottleneck for large-scale electronic structure problems. We introduce mirror subspace diagonalization (MSD), which approaches the theoretical lower bound on the sampling cost for quantum Krylov algorithms built upon real-time evolution. MSD uses a finite-difference formula to express the Hamiltonian as a linear combination of time-evolution unitaries with symmetrically shifted timesteps, enabling efficient estimation of the Hamiltonian matrix within the Krylov subspace. By optimizing the timestep and shifting the energy spectrum, finite-difference and statistical errors are minimized simultaneously, allowing MSD to attain the sampling-cost lower bound up to a logarithmic factor. We further apply classical post-processing to infer Hamiltonian moments, which mitigate the ground-state energy error via the Lanczos scheme. Our analysis shows MSD is particularly effective when the Hamiltonian's spectral norm is much smaller than its 1-norm, as in high-accuracy molecular simulations with large basis sets and strong electronic correlations. Numerical results for various molecular models show sampling-cost reductions of roughly 10 to 10,000 times over the conventional quantum Krylov algorithm.