Establishing the nature of the ground state of the Heisenberg antiferromagnet (HAFM) on the kagome lattice is well known to be a prohibitively difficult problem for classical computers. Here, we give a detailed proposal for a Variational Quantum Eige
nsolver (VQE) with the aim of solving this physical problem on a quantum computer. At the same time, this VQE constitutes an explicit proposal for showing a useful quantum advantage on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices because of its natural hardware compatibility. We classically emulate a noiseless quantum computer with the connectivity of a 2D square lattice and show how the ground state energy of a 20-site patch of the kagome HAFM, as found by the VQE, approaches the true ground state energy exponentially as a function of the circuit depth. Besides indicating the potential of quantum computers to solve for the ground state of the kagome HAFM, the classical emulation of the VQE serves as a benchmark for real quantum devices on the way towards a useful quantum advantage.
