Quantum chemistry made easier

Raymond Daudel, Bernard Pullman

Carlos L. Benavides-Riveros, José M. Gracia-Bondı́a, Joseph C. Várilly

The harmonium model has long been regarded as an exactly solvable laboratory bench for quantum chemistry [W. Heisenberg, Z. Phys. 38, 411 (1926)]. For studying correlation energy, only the ground state of the system has received consideration heretofore. This is a spin singlet state. In this work we exhaustively study the lowest excited (spin triplet) harmonium state, with the main purpose of revisiting the relation between entanglement measures and correlation energy for this quite different species. The task is made easier by working with Wigner quasiprobabilities on phase space.

Hinne Hettema

Honghui Shang, Li Shen, Yi Fan +11 more

Quantum computational chemistry (QCC) is the use of quantum computers to solve problems in computational quantum chemistry. We develop a high performance variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) simulator for simulating quantum computational chemistry problems on a new Sunway supercomputer. The major innovations include: (1) a Matrix Product State (MPS) based VQE simulator to reduce the amount of memory needed and increase the simulation efficiency; (2) a combination of the Density Matrix Embedding Theory with the MPS-based VQE simulator to further extend the simulation range; (3) A three-level parallelization scheme to scale up to 20 million cores; (4) Usage of the Julia script language as the main programming language, which both makes the programming easier and enables cutting edge performance as native C or Fortran; (5) Study of real chemistry systems based on the VQE simulator, achieving nearly linearly strong and weak scaling. Our simulation demonstrates the power of VQE for large quantum chemistry systems, thus paves the way for large-scale VQE experiments on near-term quantum computers.

Yudong Cao, Jonathan Romero, Jonathan P. Olson +10 more

Practical challenges in simulating quantum systems on classical computers have been widely recognized in the quantum physics and quantum chemistry communities over the past century. Although many approximation methods have been introduced, the complexity of quantum mechanics remains hard to appease. The advent of quantum computation brings new pathways to navigate this challenging and complex landscape. By manipulating quantum states of matter and taking advantage of their unique features such as superposition and entanglement, quantum computers promise to efficiently deliver accurate results for many important problems in quantum chemistry, such as the electronic structure of molecules. In the past two decades, significant advances have been made in developing algorithms and physical hardware for quantum computing, heralding a revolution in simulation of quantum systems. This Review provides an overview of the algorithms and results that are relevant for quantum chemistry. The intended audience is both quantum chemists who seek to learn more about quantum computing and quantum computing researchers who would like to explore applications in quantum chemistry.