Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userHardware-efficient Variational Quantum Eigensolver for Small Molecules and Quantum Magnets
167
0
0.0
(
0
)
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
Quantum computers can be used to address molecular structure, materials science and condensed matter physics problems, which currently stretch the limits of existing high-performance computing resources. Finding exact numerical solutions to these interacting fermion problems has exponential cost, while Monte Carlo methods are plagued by the fermionic sign problem. These limitations of classical computational methods have made even few-atom molecular structures problems of practical interest for medium-sized quantum computers. Yet, thus far experimental implementations have been restricted to molecules involving only Period I elements. Here, we demonstrate the experimental optimization of up to six-qubit Hamiltonian problems with over a hundred Pauli terms, determining the ground state energy for molecules of increasing size, up to BeH2. This is enabled by a hardware-efficient variational quantum eigensolver with trial states specifically tailored to the available interactions in our quantum processor, combined with a compact encoding of fermionic Hamiltonians and a robust stochastic optimization routine. We further demonstrate the flexibility of our approach by applying the technique to a problem of quantum magnetism. Across all studied problems, we find agreement between experiment and numerical simulations with a noisy model of the device. These results help elucidate the requirements for scaling the method to larger systems, and aim at bridging the gap between problems at the forefront of high-performance computing and their implementation on quantum hardware.
rate research
Read More
Hybrid quantum-classical algorithms have been proposed as a potentially viable application of quantum computers. A particular example - the variational quantum eigensolver, or VQE - is designed to determine a global minimum in an energy landscape specified by a quantum Hamiltonian, which makes it appealing for the needs of quantum chemistry. Experimental realizations have been reported in recent years and theoretical estimates of its efficiency are a subject of intense effort. Here we consider the performance of the VQE technique for a Hubbard-like model describing a one-dimensional chain of fermions with competing nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor interactions. We find that recovering the VQE solution allows one to obtain the correlation function of the ground state consistent with the exact result. We also study the barren plateau phenomenon for the Hamiltonian in question and find that the severity of this effect depends on the encoding of fermions to qubits. Our results are consistent with the current knowledge about the barren plateaus in quantum optimization.
The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a promising algorithm to compute eigenstates and eigenenergies of a given quantum system that can be performed on a near-term quantum computer. Obtaining eigenstates and eigenenergies in a specific symmetry sector of the system is often necessary for practical applications of the VQE in various fields ranging from high energy physics to quantum chemistry. It is common to add a penalty term in the cost function of the VQE to calculate such a symmetry-resolving energy spectrum, but systematic analysis on the effect of the penalty term has been lacking, and the use of the penalty term in the VQE has not been justified rigorously. In this work, we investigate two major types of penalty terms for the VQE that were proposed in the previous studies. We show a penalty term in one of the two types works properly in that eigenstates obtained by the VQE with the penalty term reside in the desired symmetry sector. We further give a convenient formula to determine the magnitude of the penalty term, which may lead to the faster convergence of the VQE. Meanwhile, we prove that the other type of penalty terms does not work for obtaining the target state with the desired symmetry in a rigorous sense and even gives completely wrong results in some cases. We finally provide numerical simulations to validate our analysis. Our results apply to general quantum systems and lay the theoretical foundation for the use of the VQE with the penalty terms to obtain the symmetry-resolving energy spectrum of the system, which fuels the application of a near-term quantum computer.
The problem of finding the ground state energy of a Hamiltonian using a quantum computer is currently solved using either the quantum phase estimation (QPE) or variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithms. For precision $epsilon$, QPE requires $O(1)$ repetitions of circuits with depth $O(1/epsilon)$, whereas each expectation estimation subroutine within VQE requires $O(1/epsilon^{2})$ samples from circuits with depth $O(1)$. We propose a generalised VQE algorithm that interpolates between these two regimes via a free parameter $alphain[0,1]$ which can exploit quantum coherence over a circuit depth of $O(1/epsilon^{alpha})$ to reduce the number of samples to $O(1/epsilon^{2(1-alpha)})$. Along the way, we give a new routine for expectation estimation under limited quantum resources that is of independent interest.
The variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is one of the most representative quantum algorithms in the noisy intermediate-size quantum (NISQ) era, and is generally speculated to deliver one of the first quantum advantages for the ground-state simulations of some non-trivial Hamiltonians. However, short quantum coherence time and limited availability of quantum hardware resources in the NISQ hardware strongly restrain the capacity and expressiveness of VQEs. In this Letter, we introduce the variational quantum-neural hybrid eigensolver (VQNHE) in which the shallow-circuit quantum ansatz can be further enhanced by classical post-processing with neural networks. We show that VQNHE consistently and significantly outperforms VQE in simulating ground-state energies of quantum spins and molecules given the same amount of quantum resources. More importantly, we demonstrate that for arbitrary post-processing neural functions, VQNHE only incurs an polynomial overhead of processing time and represents the first scalable method to exponentially accelerate VQE with non-unitary post-processing that can be efficiently implemented in the NISQ era.
Recent practical approaches for the use of current generation noisy quantum devices in the simulation of quantum many-body problems have been dominated by the use of a variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). These coupled quantum-classical algorithms leverage the ability to perform many repeated measurements to avoid the currently prohibitive gate depths often required for exact quantum algorithms, with the restriction of a parameterized circuit to describe the states of interest. In this work, we show how the calculation of zero-temperature dynamic correlation functions defining the linear response characteristics of quantum systems can also be recast into a modified VQE algorithm, which can be incorporated into the current variational quantum infrastructure. This allows for these important physical expectation values describing the dynamics of the system to be directly converged on the frequency axis, and they approach exactness over all frequencies as the flexibility of the parameterization increases. The frequency resolution hence does not explicitly scale with gate depth, which is approximately twice as deep as a ground state VQE. We apply the method to compute the single-particle Greens function of ab initio dihydrogen and lithium hydride molecules, and demonstrate the use of a practical active space embedding approach to extend to larger systems. While currently limited by the fidelity of two-qubit gates, whose number is increased compared to the ground state algorithm on current devices, we believe the approach shows potential for the extraction of frequency dynamics of correlated systems on near-term quantum processors.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
