Abstract Variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) with a unitary coupled cluster (UCC) ansatz has been suggested as a promising method for electronic structure calculations on future quantum computers. However, the complexity of the excitation terms for UCC with the single and double excitations (UCCSD) ansatz is up‐bounded to , where N is the number of electrons and M is the number of spin orbitals. The gate complexity of quantum circuit for the UCCSD ansatz is up‐bounded to using the Jordan–Wigner transformation. These complexities significantly limit the implementation of UCCSD on current Noisy Intermediate‐Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Herein, we developed a k‐QUpCCGSD ansatz which is based on the generalized paired double excitation operators and the particle preserving exchange gate. The former reduces the number of the excitation operators, the latter reduces the number of qubit gates for transforming excitation operators to quantum circuit. The gate complexity of the proposed k‐QUpCCGSD ansatz is up‐bounded to , which significantly reduce the complexity of the VQE algorithm on NISQ devices. The performance of the proposed ansatz on VQE is demonstrated by calculating ground‐state dissociation energy curves of the H6, LiH, H2O, and BeH2 molecules with the STO‐3G minimal basis set, and the accuracy is evaluated by comparing to the full configuration interaction (FCI) benchmarks. Moreover, we compare the number of quantum gates, especially the CNOT gates, and accuracies of various ansatzes. The assessments have shown that the accuracy of qubit unitary coupled cluster (QUCC) ansatzes is slightly worse than that of the UCC ones, but the circuit complexity of QUCC is much less than that of UCC. Among the tested QUCC ansatzes, k‐QUpCCGSD achieves higher accuracy with fewer quantum gates than QUCCSD, and k‐QUpCCGSD is a promising ansatz for VQE calculation on NISQ devices.
Abstract Variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) with a unitary coupled cluster (UCC) ansatz has been suggested as a promising method for electronic structure calculations on future quantum computers. However, the complexity of the excitation terms for UCC with the single and double excitations (UCCSD) ansatz is up‐bounded to , where N is the number of electrons and M is the number of spin orbitals. The gate complexity of quantum circuit for the UCCSD ansatz is up‐bounded to using the Jordan–Wigner transformation. These complexities significantly limit the implementation of UCCSD on current Noisy Intermediate‐Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Herein, we developed a k‐QUpCCGSD ansatz which is based on the generalized paired double excitation operators and the particle preserving exchange gate. The former reduces the number of the excitation operators, the latter reduces the number of qubit gates for transforming excitation operators to quantum circuit. The gate complexity of the proposed k‐QUpCCGSD ansatz is up‐bounded to , which significantly reduce the complexity of the VQE algorithm on NISQ devices. The performance of the proposed ansatz on VQE is demonstrated by calculating ground‐state dissociation energy curves of the H6, LiH, H2O, and BeH2 molecules with the STO‐3G minimal basis set, and the accuracy is evaluated by comparing to the full configuration interaction (FCI) benchmarks. Moreover, we compare the number of quantum gates, especially the CNOT gates, and accuracies of various ansatzes. The assessments have shown that the accuracy of qubit unitary coupled cluster (QUCC) ansatzes is slightly worse than that of the UCC ones, but the circuit complexity of QUCC is much less than that of UCC. Among the tested QUCC ansatzes, k‐QUpCCGSD achieves higher accuracy with fewer quantum gates than QUCCSD, and k‐QUpCCGSD is a promising ansatz for VQE calculation on NISQ devices.
Abstract Variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) for electronic structure calculations is believed to be one major potential application of near term quantum computing. Among all proposed VQE algorithms, the unitary coupled cluster singles and doubles excitations (UCCSD) VQE ansatz has achieved high accuracy and received a lot of research interest. However, the UCCSD VQE based on fermionic excitations needs extra terms for the parity when using Jordan–Wigner transformation. Here we introduce a new VQE ansatz based on the particle preserving exchange gate to achieve qubit excitations. The proposed VQE ansatz has gate complexity up-bounded to O ( n 4 ) for all-to-all connectivity where n is the number of qubits of the Hamiltonian. Numerical results of simple molecular systems such as BeH 2 , H 2 O, N 2 , H 4 and H 6 using the proposed VQE ansatz gives very accurate results within errors about 10 −3 Hartree.
We introduce a unitary coupled-cluster (UCC) ansatz termed k -UpCCGSD that is based on a family of sparse generalized doubles operators, which provides an affordable and systematically improvable unitary coupled-cluster wave function suitable for implementation on a near-term quantum computer. k -UpCCGSD employs k products of the exponential of pair coupled-cluster double excitation operators (pCCD), together with generalized single excitation operators. We compare its performance in both efficiency of implementation and accuracy with that of the generalized UCC ansatz employing the full generalized single and double excitation operators (UCCGSD), as well as with the standard ansatz employing only single and double excitations (UCCSD). k -UpCCGSD is found to show the best scaling for quantum computing applications, requiring a circuit depth of, compared with for UCCGSD, and for UCCSD, where N is the number of spin orbitals and η is the number of electrons. We analyzed the accuracy of these three ansätze by making classical benchmark calculations on the ground state and the first excited state of H 4 (STO-3G, 6-31G), H 2 O (STO-3G), and N 2 (STO-3G), making additional comparisons to conventional coupled cluster methods. The results for ground states show that k -UpCCGSD offers a good trade-off between accuracy and cost, achieving chemical accuracy for lower cost of implementation on quantum computers than both UCCGSD and UCCSD. UCCGSD is also found to be more accurate than UCCSD but at a greater cost for implementation. Excited states are calculated with an orthogonally constrained variational quantum eigensolver approach. This is seen to generally yield less accurate energies than for the corresponding ground states. We demonstrate that using a specialized multideterminantal reference state constructed from classical linear response calculations allows these excited state energetics to be improved.
Abstract The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm, designed to calculate the energy of molecular ground states on near‐term quantum computers, requires specification of symmetries that describe the system, for example, spin state and number of electrons. This opens the possibility of using VQE to obtain excited states as the lowest‐energy solutions of a given set of symmetries. In this paper, the performances of various unitary coupled cluster (UCC) ansätze applied to VQE calculations on excited states are investigated using quantum circuits designed to represent single reference and multireference wavefunctions to calculate energy curves with respect to variations in the molecular geometry. These ansätze include standard Unitary Coupled Cluster Singles and Doubles (UCCSD), as well as modified versions of Unitary Coupled Cluster Generalized Singles and Doubles (UCCGSD) and k‐UpCCGSD, which are engineered to tackle excited states without undesired spin symmetry crossover to lower states during VQE optimization. These studies are carried out on a range of systems, including H2, H3, H4, NH, OH+, CH2, and , covering examples of spin singlet, doublet, and triplet molecular ground states with single and multireference excited states. In most cases, our calculations are in excellent agreement with results from full‐configuration interaction calculations on classical machines, thus showing that the VQE algorithm is capable of calculating the lowest excited state at a certain symmetry, including multireference closed‐ and open‐shell states, by setting appropriate restrictions on the excitations considered in the cluster operator and appropriate constraints in the qubit register encoding the starting mean field state.
High Resolution Image Download MS PowerPoint Slide Quantum computers have the potential to efficiently solve the electronic structure problem but are currently limited by noise and shallow circuits. We present an enhanced Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) ansatz based on the Qubit Coupled Cluster (QCC) approach that requires optimization of only n parameters, where n is the number of Pauli string generators, rather than the typical n + 2 m parameters, where m is the number of qubits. We evaluate the ground state energies and molecular dissociation curves of strongly correlated molecules, namely O 3 and Li 4, using active spaces of varying sizes in conjunction with our enhanced QCC ansatz, Unitary Coupled Cluster Single–Double (UCCSD) ansatz, and the classical Coupled Cluster Singles and Doubles (CCSD) method. Compared to UCCSD, our approach significantly reduces the number of parameters while maintaining high accuracy. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, and experiments on superconducting and trapped-ion quantum computers showcase its practicality on real hardware. By eliminating the need for symmetry-restoring gates and reducing the number of parameters, our enhanced QCC ansatz enables accurate quantum chemistry calculations on near-term quantum devices for strongly correlated systems.
The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) with shallow or constant-depth quantum circuits is one of the most pursued approaches in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices with incoherent errors. In this study, the divide-and-conquer (DC) linear scaling technique, which divides the entire system into several fragments, is applied to the VQE algorithm based on the unitary coupled cluster (UCC) method, denoted as DC-qUCC/VQE, to reduce the number of required qubits. The unitarity of the UCC ansatz that enables the evaluation of the total energy as well as various molecular properties as expectation values can be easily implemented on quantum devices because the quantum gates are unitary operators themselves. Based on this feature, the present DC-qUCC/VQE algorithm is designed to conserve the total number of electrons in the entire system using the density matrix evaluated on a quantum computer. Numerical assessments clarified that the energy errors of the DC-qUCC/VQE calculations decrease by using the constraint of the total number of electrons. Furthermore, the DC-qUCC/VQE algorithm could reduce the number of quantum gates and shows the possibility of decreasing incoherent errors.
In this study, the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) on a quantum simulator is used in calculating ground state electronic structure properties of the LiHn, n = 1–3, complexes including their singly charged ions. Results calculated using classical electronic structure algorithms are also included. We investigate the use of the unitary coupled cluster with singles and doubles (UCCSD) Ansatz using VQE within Qiskit and compare results to full configuration interaction (FCI) calculations. Computed ground state energies, electron affinities, ionization potentials, and dipole moments are considered. We report the first-of-its-kind simulated quantum computing results of selected LiHn species and use the parity orbital to qubit mapping scheme. We find that VQE/UCCSD results are comparable to classical coupled clusters with singles and doubles for all considered systems with respect to FCI. A VQE calculation cost evaluation is included in which we evaluate performance using both Jordan–Wigner and parity orbital to qubit mapping schemes. We also discuss some of the current limitations of utilizing VQE for the study of chemical systems.