Quantum algorithms for electronic-structure simulations are actively being developed, yet many hybrid quantum-classical approaches are bottlenecked by the measurement overhead associated with large molecular Hamiltonians. Here, we introduce a diagonalization-driven framework that progressively drives the electronic Hamiltonian toward a (block-)diagonal form in the Slater-determinant basis using sequential Givens rotations. In contrast to Schrödinger-picture methods that variationally optimize a wave function, our approach adopts a Heisenberg-picture viewpoint: the Hamiltonian is iteratively transformed, and rotation angles are determined classically from low-dimensional effective blocks, reducing the quantum workload to a small, fixed set of matrix-element measurements per iteration. Candidate generators are estimated via approximate Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff updates with truncation and cumulant-based approximations that control Hamiltonian growth, complemented by stochastic selection to avoid stagnation. We further introduce an angle-merging procedure that reduces circuit depth by consolidating repeated small-angle rotations. We benchmark the framework on N2 and strongly correlated hydrogen systems, assessing convergence behavior, residual-structure diagnostics, measurement-accuracy trade-offs, circuit costs, and robustness under finite sampling.
Quantum algorithms for electronic-structure simulations are actively being developed, yet many hybrid quantum-classical approaches are bottlenecked by the measurement overhead associated with large molecular Hamiltonians. Here, we introduce a diagonalization-driven framework that progressively drives the electronic Hamiltonian toward a (block-)diagonal form in the Slater-determinant basis using sequential Givens rotations. In contrast to Schrödinger-picture methods that variationally optimize a wave function, our approach adopts a Heisenberg-picture viewpoint: the Hamiltonian is iteratively transformed, and rotation angles are determined classically from low-dimensional effective blocks, reducing the quantum workload to a small, fixed set of matrix-element measurements per iteration. Candidate generators are estimated via approximate Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff updates with truncation and cumulant-based approximations that control Hamiltonian growth, complemented by stochastic selection to avoid stagnation. We further introduce an angle-merging procedure that reduces circuit depth by consolidating repeated small-angle rotations. We benchmark the framework on N2 and strongly correlated hydrogen systems, assessing convergence behavior, residual-structure diagnostics, measurement-accuracy trade-offs, circuit costs, and robustness under finite sampling.
Quantum algorithms for electronic-structure simulations are actively being developed, yet many hybrid quantum-classical approaches are bottlenecked by the measurement overhead associated with large molecular Hamiltonians. Here we introduce a diagonalization-driven framework that progressively drives the electronic Hamiltonian toward a (block-)diagonal form in the Slater-determinant basis using sequential Givens rotations. In contrast to Schrödinger-picture methods that variationally optimize a wave function, our approach adopts a Heisenberg-picture viewpoint: the Hamiltonian is iteratively transformed, and rotation angles are determined classically from low-dimensional effective blocks, reducing the quantum workload to a small, fixed set of matrix-element measurements per iteration. Candidate generators are estimated via approximate Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff updates with truncation and cumulant-based approximations that control Hamiltonian growth, complemented by stochastic selection to avoid stagnation. We further introduce an angle-merging procedure that reduces circuit depth by consolidating repeated small-angle rotations. We benchmark the framework on N2 and strongly correlated hydrogen systems, assessing convergence behavior, residual-structure diagnostics, measurement-accuracy trade-offs, circuit costs, and robustness under finite sampling.
The performance of quantum algorithms for eigenvalue problems, such as computing Hamiltonian spectra, depends strongly on the overlap of the initial wave function and the target eigenvector. In a basis of Slater determinants, the representation of energy eigenstates of systems with N strongly correlated electrons requires a number of determinants that scales exponentially with N . On classical processors, this restricts simulations to systems where N is small. Here, we show that quantum computers can efficiently simulate strongly correlated molecular systems by directly encoding the dominant entanglement structure in the form of spin-coupled initial states. This avoids resorting to expensive classical or quantum state preparation heuristics and instead exploits symmetries in the wave function. We provide quantum circuits for deterministic preparation of a family of spin eigenfunctions with ( N N / 2 ) Slater determinants with depth O ( N ) and O ( N 2 ) local gates. Their use as highly entangled initial states in quantum algorithms reduces the total runtime of quantum phase estimation and related fault-tolerant methods by orders of magnitude. Furthermore, we assess the application of spin-coupled wave functions as initial states for a range of heuristic quantum algorithms, namely, the variational quantum eigensolver, adiabatic state preparation, and different versions of quantum subspace diagonalization (QSD) including QSD based on real-time-evolved states. We also propose a QSD algorithm that exploits states obtained through adaptive quantum eigensolvers. For all algorithms, we demonstrate that using spin-coupled initial states drastically reduces the quantum resources required to simulate strongly correlated ground and excited states. Our work provides a crucial component for enabling scalable quantum simulation of classically challenging electronic systems.
The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm designed for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware to estimate eigenvalues of many-body Hamiltonians. Unlike fully quantum approaches such as quantum phase estimation (QPE), VQE trades deep coherent circuits for repeated state preparation, measurement, and classical optimization, making it more compatible with limited qubit counts and finite coherence times. Recent developments have focused on reducing quantum resource requirements while retaining chemically meaningful wavefunction structure. In this paper, we examine recent progress in VQE methods for molecular electronic structure with an emphasis on three themes: (i) strategies for circuit and ansatz complexity reduction, including adaptive and selectively screened approaches, (ii) chemically motivated workflows that combine VQE with orbital optimization, fragmentation, and localized active-space ideas to better address strong correlation, and (iii) extensions of VQE to excited-state calculations. Throughout, we emphasize the tradeoffs among parameter count, gate depth, symmetry preservation, measurement overhead, and classical preprocessing, and discuss where these approaches may become most useful for chemically challenging active spaces. We also highlight benchmarking considerations for assessing both accuracy and resource requirements, and conclude with a perspective on regimes in which VQE may offer the greatest long-term value, particularly multireference active spaces and low-lying excited-state manifolds.
Quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI) methods use a quantum computer to identify dominant electronic configurations in the molecular ground state, while a classical computer diagonalizes the Hamiltonian within the reduced subspace spanned by those configurations. Sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD), a leading QSCI approach, uses iterative classical post-processing to correct noisy quantum measurement to ensure that the corresponding configurations remain physically sensible. In this work, we show that SQD performance can be strongly influenced by uncontrolled growth of the classical diagonalization subspace. When classical resources are not explicitly constrained, classical uniform random sampling can reproduce SQD benchmarks as noise increases the diversity of sampled configurations. We show any fair benchmarking protocol of SQD must explicitly control diagonalization size over unique samples. We then address the problem of efficiently discovering physically relevant, energy-lowering configurations by introducing a measurement protocol based on non-orthogonal configuration interaction (NOCI). By distributing measurements across orbital bases optimized with respect to the molecular Hamiltonian, we obtain improved sample efficiency relative to measurements performed solely in the Hartree--Fock basis. Importantly, these improvements persist even under fixed classical resource budgets, demonstrating that the resulting configurations are of higher quality rather than being more numerous. Under our proposed benchmarking procedure, we establish measurement-basis engineering as a promising route to improving quantum sampling methods for electronic structure.
We introduce a Basis Adaptive (BA) algorithm for hybrid quantum-classical simulation of correlated quantum many-body systems. Starting from a small set of physically motivated bitstrings, the algorithm iteratively applies a single-step first-order Trotterized circuit on a quantum processor, filters the sampled configurations by enforcing U(1) spin conservation and lattice reflection symmetry, and classically diagonalizes the Hamiltonian in the resulting reduced Hilbert space. This design avoids the variational optimization overhead of VQE, the deep coherent circuits required by QPE, and the symmetry-violating subspaces that arise in SKQD. The ground-state energy error is bounded analytically by 8∥H∥(1−αDT)1/2, where αDT is the probability weight captured by the DT sampled basis states. This bound connects algorithm performance directly to ground-state sparsity and explains the observed accuracy hierarchy across different phases. Benchmarked on the spin-1/2 Heisenberg XXZ chain (up to N=62 qubits on the IBM Heron processor), the algorithm achieves a 3.5% energy error in the gapped Neel phase (Δ=2.0) and below 0.5% at the ferromagnetic boundary (Δ=−1.0). The accuracy degrades to 28.7% in the strongly quasi-long-range-ordered regime (Δ=0.5). Spin-spin correlation functions are reproduced across all regimes, confirming that symmetry-filtered real-time sampling provides a practical and noise-resilient pathway to ground-state properties on near-term quantum hardware.
Molecular ground-state energies help determine conformer rankings, reaction energetics, and electronic effects in computational drug discovery, but accurate calculations become difficult when strong correlation or large active spaces are important. Variational quantum eigensolvers estimate these energies by optimizing a parameterized quantum state, making ansatz design central to both accuracy and cost. We study a fixed-topology Givens-exchange ansatz that avoids architecture search. The circuit starts from the computational-basis state with the lowest diagonal Hamiltonian expectation and applies local RY rotations with two ordered all-pair Givens exchange blocks. Parameters are optimized using Hamiltonian expectation values, while exact diagonalization is used only after optimization to compute errors and fidelities. Across six fixed seeds, coefficient-verified LiH-6 and H2O-8 Hamiltonians, together with a BeH2-6 public-specification candidate, are chemically accurate in every run. The corresponding six-seed mean errors are 0.000000124 Hartree, equivalent to 0.000124 milli-Hartree; 0.000128558 Hartree, equivalent to 0.128558 milli-Hartree; and 0.000002152 Hartree, equivalent to 0.002152 milli-Hartree, respectively. On LiH-6 and H2O-8, these mean errors are lower than the published point errors of the compared quantum-architecture-search methods, while the ansatz uses a larger pre-compilation macro budget. The method is therefore an accurate, reproducible, and search-free reference template for molecular variational eigensolvers.