The calculation of excited state energies of electronic structure Hamiltonians has many important applications, such as the calculation of optical spectra and reaction rates. While low-depth quantum algorithms, such as the variational quantum eigenvalue solver (VQE), have been used to determine ground state energies, methods for calculating excited states currently involve the implementation of high-depth controlled-unitaries or a large number of additional samples. Here we show how overlap estimation can be used to deflate eigenstates once they are found, enabling the calculation of excited state energies and their degeneracies. We propose an implementation that requires the same number of qubits as VQE and at most twice the circuit depth. Our method is robust to control errors, is compatible with error-mitigation strategies and can be implemented on near-term quantum computers.

Quantum simulation of chemistry and materials is predicted to be an important application for both near-term and fault-tolerant quantum devices. However, at present, developing and studying algorithms for these problems can be difficult due to the prohibitive amount of domain knowledge required in both the area of chemistry and quantum algorithms. To help bridge this gap and open the field to more researchers, we have developed the OpenFermion software package (www.openfermion.org). OpenFermion is an open-source software library written largely in Python under an Apache 2.0 license, aimed at enabling the simulation of fermionic and bosonic models and quantum chemistry problems on quantum hardware. Beginning with an interface to common electronic structure packages, it simplifies the translation between a molecular specification and a quantum circuit for solving or studying the electronic structure problem on a

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 , QPE requires O(1) repetitions of circuits with depth O(1/ ), whereas each expectation estimation subroutine within VQE requires O(1/ 2 ) samples from circuits with depth O(1). We propose a generalised VQE algorithm that interpolates between these two regimes via a free parameter α ∈ [0, 1] which can exploit quantum coherence over a circuit depth of O(1/ α ) to reduce the number of samples to O (1/ 2(1−α) ). Along the way, we give a new routine for expectation estimation under limited quantum resources that is of independent interest. I.

Practical quantum computing will require error rates well below those achievable with physical qubits. Quantum error correction1,2 offers a path to algorithmically relevant error rates by encoding logical qubits within many physical qubits, for which increasing the number of physical qubits enhances protection against physical errors. However, introducing more qubits also increases the number of error sources, so the density of errors must be sufficiently low for logical performance to improve with increasing code size. Here we report the measurement of logical qubit performance scaling across several code sizes, and demonstrate that our system of superconducting qubits has sufficient performance to overcome the additional errors from increasing qubit number. We find that our distance-5 surface code logical qubit modestly outperforms an ensemble of distance-3 logical qubits on average, in terms of both logical error probability over 25 cycles and logical error per cycle ((2.914 ± 0.016)% compared to (3.028 ± 0.023)%). To investigate damaging, low-probability error sources, we run a distance-25 repetition code and observe a 1.7 × 10−6 logical error per cycle floor set by a single high-energy event (1.6 × 10−7 excluding this event). We accurately model our experiment, extracting error budgets that highlight the biggest challenges for future systems. These results mark an experimental demonstration in which quantum error correction begins to improve performance with increasing qubit number, illuminating the path to reaching the logical error rates required for computation.

This paper introduces PyMatching, a fast open-source Python package for decoding quantum error-correcting codes with the minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM) algorithm. PyMatching includes the standard MWPM decoder as well as a variant, which we call local matching , that restricts each syndrome defect to be matched to another defect within a local neighbourhood. The decoding performance of local matching is almost identical to that of the standard MWPM decoder in practice, while reducing the computational complexity. We benchmark the performance of PyMatching, showing that local matching is several orders of magnitude faster than implementations of the full MWPM algorithm using NetworkX or Blossom V for problem sizes typically considered in error correction simulations. PyMatching and its dependencies are open-source, and it can be used to decode any quantum code for which syndrome defects come in pairs using a simple Python interface. PyMatching supports the use of weighted edges, hook errors, boundaries and measurement errors, enabling fast decoding and simulation of fault-tolerant quantum computing.