Electronic excited states of molecules are central to many physical and chemical processes, and yet they are typically more difficult to compute than ground states. In this paper we leverage the advantages of quantum computers to develop an algorithm for the highly accurate calculation of excited states. We solve a contracted Schrödinger equation (CSE) -- a contraction (projection) of the Schrödinger equation onto the space of two electrons -- whose solutions correspond identically to the ground and excited states of the Schrödinger equation. While recent quantum algorithms for solving the CSE, known as contracted quantum eigensolvers (CQE), have focused on ground states, we develop a CQE based on the variance that is designed to optimize rapidly to a ground or excited state. We apply the algorithm in a classical simulation without noise to computing the ground and excited states of H$_{4}$ and BH.
Quantum computers potentially have an exponential advantage over classical computers for the quantum simulation of many-fermion quantum systems. Nonetheless, fermions are more expensive to simulate than bosons due to the fermionic encoding -- a mapping by which the qubits are encoded with fermion statistics. Here we generalize the contracted quantum eigensolver (CQE) to avoid fermionic encoding of the wave function. In contrast to the variational quantum eigensolver, the CQE solves for a many-fermion stationary state by minimizing the contraction (projection) of the Schrödinger equation onto t…
A contracted quantum eigensolver (CQE) finds a solution to the many-electron Schrödinger equation by solving its integration (or contraction) to the 2-electron space -- a contracted Schrödinger equation (CSE) -- on a quantum computer. When applied to the anti-Hermitian part of the CSE (ACSE), the CQE iterations optimize the wave function with respect to a general product ansatz of two-body exponential unitary transformations that can exactly solve the Schrödinger equation. In this work, we accelerate the convergence of the CQE and its wavefunction ansatz via tools from classical optimization t…
The simulation of strongly correlated many-electron systems is one of the most promising applications for near-term quantum devices. Here we use a class of eigenvalue solvers (presented in Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 070504 (2021)) in which a contraction of the Schrödinger equation is solved for the two-electron reduced density matrix (2-RDM) to resolve the energy splittings of ortho-, meta-, and para-isomers of benzyne ${\textrm C_6} {\textrm H_4}$. In contrast to the traditional variational quantum eigensolver, the contracted quantum eigensolver solves an integration (or contraction) of the many-e…
The ground and excited state calculations at key geometries, such as the Frank-Condon (FC) and the conical intersection (CI) geometries, are essential for understanding photophysical properties. To compute these geometries on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, we proposed a strategy that combined a chemistry-inspired spin-restricted ansatz and a new excited state calculation method called the variational quantum eigensolver under automatically-adjusted constraints (VQE/AC). Unlike the conventional excited state calculation method, called the variational quantum deflation, the VQE/AC doe…
Solving for molecular excited states remains one of the key challenges of modern quantum chemistry. Traditional methods are constrained by existing computational capabilities, limiting the complexity of the molecules that can be studied or the accuracy of the results that can be obtained. Several quantum computing methods have been suggested to address this limitation. However, these typically have hardware requirements which may not be achieved in the near term. We propose a variational quantum machine learning based method to determine molecular excited states aiming at being as resilient as…
The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE), a variational algorithm to obtain an approximated ground state of a given Hamiltonian, is an appealing application of near-term quantum computers. The original work [A. Peruzzo et al.; \textit{Nat. Commun.}; \textbf{5}, 4213 (2014)] focused only on finding a ground state, whereas the excited states can also induce interesting phenomena in molecules and materials. Calculating excited states is, in general, a more difficult task than finding ground states for classical computers. To extend the framework to excited states, we here propose an algorithm, t…
Quantum computers have the potential for an exponential speedup of classical molecular computations. However, existing algorithms have limitations; quantum phase estimation (QPE) algorithms are intractable on current hardware while variational quantum eigensolvers (VQE) are dependent upon approximate wave functions without guaranteed convergence. In this Article we present an algorithm that yields verifiably exact solutions of the many-electron Schrödinger equation. Rather than solve the Schrödinger equation directly, we solve its contraction over all electrons except two, known as the contrac…
Ab initio electronic excited state calculations are necessary for the quantitative study of photochemical reactions, but their accurate computation on classical computers is plagued by prohibitive scaling. The Variational Quantum Deflation (VQD) is an extension of the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) for calculating electronic excited state energies, and has the potential to address some of these scaling challenges using quantum computers. However, quantum computers available in the near term can only support a limited number of circuit operations, so reducing the quantum computational co…
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, e.g. 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…
Demonstration of subspace-search variational quantum eigensolver using photonic orbital angular momentum qudits
Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST)（韩国科学技术院）；Korea University of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学）；Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology（光州科学技术院）
Variational quantum eigensolver(VQE) typically minimizes energy with hybrid quantum-classical optimization, which aims to find the ground state. Here, we propose a VQE by minimizing energy variance, which is called as variance-VQE(VVQE). The VVQE can be viewed as an self-verifying eigensolver for arbitrary eigenstate by designing, since an eigenstate for a Hamiltonian should have zero energy variance. We demonstrate properties and advantages of VVQE for solving a set of excited states with quantum chemistry problems. Remarkably, we show that optimization of a combination of energy and variance…
How an Equi-ensemble Description Systematically Outperforms the Weighted-ensemble Variational Quantum Eigensolver
ICGM, Université de Montpellier, CNRS, ENSCM（蒙彼利埃大学，法国国家科学研究中心，国立高等化学学校）；Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Scienze dell’Informazione e Matematica, Università dell’Aquila（阿奎拉大学）
A programmable quantum device that has a large number of qubits without fault-tolerance has emerged recently. Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) is one of the most promising ways to utilize the computational power of such devices to solve problems in condensed matter physics and quantum chemistry. As the size of the current quantum devices is still not large for rivaling classical computers at solving practical problems, Fujii et al. proposed a method called "Deep VQE" which can provide the ground state of a given quantum system with the smaller number of qubits by combining the VQE and the…
Variational-Quantum-Eigensolver(VQE) method on a quantum computer is a well-known hybrid algorithm to solve the eigenstates and eigenvalues that uses both quantum and classical computers. This method has the potential to solve quantum chemical simulation including polymer and complex optimization problems that are never able to be solved in a realistic time. Though they are many papers on VQE, there are many hurdles before practical application. Therefore, we tried to evaluate VQE methods with Genetic Algorithms(GA). In this paper, we propose the VQE method with GA. We selected ground and exci…
Highly excited states of quantum many-body systems are central objects in the study of quantum dynamics and thermalization that challenge classical computational methods due to their volume-law entanglement content. In this work, we explore the potential of variational quantum algorithms to approximate such states. We propose an adaptive variational algorithm, adaptive VQE-X, that self-generates a variational ansatz for arbitrary eigenstates of a many-body Hamiltonian $H$ by attempting to minimize the energy variance with respect to $H$. We benchmark the method by applying it to an Ising spin …
We propose an excited-state molecular dynamics simulation method based on variational quantum algorithms at a computational cost comparable to that of ground-state simulations. We utilize the feature that excited states can be obtained as metastable states in the restricted variational quantum eigensolver calculation with a hardware-efficient ansatz. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, molecular dynamics simulations are performed for the S1 excited states of H2 and CH2NH molecules. The results are consistent with those of the exact adiabatic simulations in the S1 states, except for…
Reflecting the increasing interest in quantum computing, the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) has attracted much attentions as a possible application of near-term quantum computers. Although the VQE has often been applied to quantum chemistry, high computational cost is required for reliable results because infinitely many measurements are needed to obtain an accurate expectation value and the expectation value is calculated many times to minimize a cost function in the variational optimization procedure. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the computational cost of the VQE for a practic…
The ability of near-term quantum computers to represent classically-intractable quantum states has brought much interest in using such devices for estimating the ground and excited state energies of fermionic Hamiltonians. The usefulness of such near-term techniques, generally based on the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), however, is limited by device noise and the need to perform many circuit repetitions. This paper addresses these challenges by generalizing VQE to consider wavefunctions in a subspace spanned by classically tractable states and states that can be prepared on a quantum c…
Auger Spectroscopy via Generative Quantum Eigensolver: A Quantum Approach to Molecular Excitations
Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation（三菱化学株式会社）；Quantum Computing Center, Keio University（庆应义塾大学量子计算中心）；Mizuho Research & Technologies, Ltd.（瑞穗研究技术有限公司）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Subspace-Search Variational Quantum Eigen solver (SSVQE) is a searching method of multiple states and relies on the unitarity of transformations to ensure the orthogonality of output states for multiple states. Therefore, this method is thought to be a promising method for quantum chemistry because ordinary Variational Quantum Eigen solver (VQE) can only calculate the excited states step by step from the ground state based on Variational Quantum deflation (VQD). We compare the advantage of VQE, SSVQE with/without the constraint term and/or Tabu search term, which is added by the Lagrange multi…
The development of quantum algorithms to solve quantum chemistry problems has offered a promising new paradigm of performing computer simulations at the scale of atoms and molecules. Although majority of the research so far has focused on designing quantum algorithms to compute ground and excited state energies and forces, it is useful to run different simulation tasks, such as geometry optimization, with these algorithms as subroutines. Towards this end, we have created an interface for the Variational Quantum Eigensolver based molecular Energy (VQE-E) and molecular Force (VQE-F) code to the …
The variational quantum-classical algorithms are the most promising approach for achieving quantum advantage on near-term quantum simulators. Among these methods, the variational quantum eigensolver has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. While it is very effective for simulating the ground state of many-body systems, its generalization to excited states becomes very resource demanding. Here, we show that this issue can significantly be improved by exploiting the symmetries of the Hamiltonian. The improvement is even more effective for higher energy eigenstates. We introduce two meth…
We propose a scheme to restore spatial symmetry of Hamiltonian in the variational-quantum-eigensolver (VQE) algorithm for which the quantum circuit structures used usually break the Hamiltonian symmetry. The symmetry-adapted VQE scheme introduced here simply applies the projection operator, which is Hermitian but not unitary, to restore the spatial symmetry in a desired irreducible representation of the spatial group. The entanglement of a quantum state is still represented in a quantum circuit but the nonunitarity of the projection operator is treated classically as postprocessing in the VQE …
Variational-Quantum-Eigensolver (VQE) method has been known as the method of chemical calculation using quantum computers and classical computers. This method also can derive the energy levels of excited states by Variational-Quantum-Deflation (VQD) method. Although, parameter landscape of excited state have many local minimums that the results are tend to be trapped by them. Therefore, we apply Genetic Algorithms then Local Search (GA then LS) as the classical optimizer of VQE method. We performed the calculation of ground and excited states and their energies on hydrogen molecule by modified…
