No Arabic abstract
The accelerated progress in manufacturing noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing hardware has opened the possibility of exploring its application in transforming approaches to solving computationally challenging problems. The important limitations common among all NISQ computing technologies are the absence of error correction and the short coherence time, which limit the computational power of these systems. Shortening the required time of a single run of a quantum algorithm is essential for reducing environment-induced errors and for the efficiency of the computation. We have investigated the ability of a variational version of adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) to generate an accurate state more efficiently compared to existing adiabatic methods. The standard AQC method uses a time-dependent Hamiltonian, connecting the initial Hamiltonian with the final Hamiltonian. In the current approach, a navigator Hamiltonian is introduced which has a non-zero amplitude only in the middle of the annealing process. Both the initial and navigator Hamiltonians are determined using variational methods. A hermitian cluster operator, inspired by coupled-cluster theory and truncated to single and double excitations/de-excitations, is used as a navigator Hamiltonian. A comparative study of our variational algorithm (VanQver) with that of standard AQC, starting with a Hartree--Fock Hamiltonian, is presented. The results indicate that the introduction of the navigator Hamiltonian significantly improves the annealing time required to achieve chemical accuracy by two to three orders of magnitude. The efficiency of the method is demonstrated in the ground-state energy estimation of molecular systems, namely, H$_2$, P4, and LiH.
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 a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for finding the minimum eigenvalue of a Hamiltonian that involves the optimization of a parameterized quantum circuit. Since the resulting optimization problem is in general nonconvex, the method can converge to suboptimal parameter values which do not yield the minimum eigenvalue. In this work, we address this shortcoming by adopting the concept of variational adiabatic quantum computing (VAQC) as a procedure to improve VQE. In VAQC, the ground state of a continuously parameterized Hamiltonian is approximated via a parameterized quantum circuit. We discuss some basic theory of VAQC to motivate the development of a hybrid quantum-classical homotopy continuation method. The proposed method has parallels with a predictor-corrector method for numerical integration of differential equations. While there are theoretical limitations to the procedure, we see in practice that VAQC can successfully find good initial circuit parameters to initialize VQE. We demonstrate this with two examples from quantum chemistry. Through these examples, we provide empirical evidence that VAQC, combined with other techniques (an adaptive termination criteria for the classical optimizer and a variance-based resampling method for the expectation evaluation), can provide more accurate solutions than plain VQE, for the same amount of effort.
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.
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.
Variational algorithms for strongly correlated chemical and materials systems are one of the most promising applications of near-term quantum computers. We present an extension to the variational quantum eigensolver that approximates the ground state of a system by solving a generalized eigenvalue problem in a subspace spanned by a collection of parametrized quantum states. This allows for the systematic improvement of a logical wavefunction ansatz without a significant increase in circuit complexity. To minimize the circuit complexity of this approach, we propose a strategy for efficiently measuring the Hamiltonian and overlap matrix elements between states parametrized by circuits that commute with the total particle number operator. We also propose a classical Monte Carlo scheme to estimate the uncertainty in the ground state energy caused by a finite number of measurements of the matrix elements. We explain how this Monte Carlo procedure can be extended to adaptively schedule the required measurements, reducing the number of circuit executions necessary for a given accuracy. We apply these ideas to two model strongly correlated systems, a square configuration of H$_4$ and the $pi$-system of Hexatriene (C$_6$H$_8$).