We investigate the viability of the phaseless finite-temperature auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (ph-FT-AFQMC) method for ab initio systems using the uniform electron gas as a model. Through comparisons with exact results and FT coupled cluster theory, we find that ph-FT-AFQMC is sufficiently accurate at high to intermediate electronic densities. We show, both analytically and numerically, that the phaseless constraint at FT is fundamentally different from its zero-temperature counterpart (i.e., ph-ZT-AFQMC), and generally, one should not expect ph-FT-AFQMC to agree with ph-ZT-AFQMC in the low-temperature limit. With an efficient implementation, we are able to compare exchange-correlation energies to the existing results in the thermodynamic limit and find that the existing parameterizations are highly accurate. In particular, we found that ph-FT-AFQMC exchange-correlation energies are in better agreement with a known parameterization than is restricted path-integral MC in the regime of Θ ≤ 0.5 and rs ≤ 2, which highlights the strength of ph-FT-AFQMC.
We describe a hybrid quantum-classical approach to treat quantum many-body systems in the thermodynamic limit. This is done by combining numerical linked-cluster expansions (NLCE) with the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). Here, the VQE algorithm is used as a cluster solver within the NLCE. We test our hybrid quantum-classical algorithm (
NLCE+VQE) for the ferromagnetic transverse-field Ising model on the one-dimensional chain and the two-dimensional square lattice. The calculation of ground-state energies on each open cluster demands a modified Hamiltonian variational ansatz for the VQE. One major finding is convergence of
NLCE+VQE to the conventional NLCE result in the thermodynamic limit when at least
N/2 circuit repetitions (known as layers) are used in the VQE ansatz for each cluster with
N sites. Our approach demonstrates the fruitful connection of techniques known from correlated quantum many-body systems with hybrid algorithms explored on existing quantum-computing devices.