A quantum chemistry study of the first singlet (S1) and triplet (T1) excited states of phenylsulfonyl-carbazole compounds, proposed as useful thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) emitters for organic light emitting diode (OLED) applications, was performed with the quantum Equation-Of-Motion Variational Quantum Eigensolver (qEOM-VQE) and Variational Quantum Deflation (VQD) algorithms on quantum simulators and devices. These quantum simulations were performed with double zeta quality basis sets on an active space comprising the highest occupied and lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals (HOMO, LUMO) of the TADF molecules. The differences in energy separations between S1 and T1 (ΔEST) predicted by calculations on quantum simulators were found to be in excellent agreement with experimental data. Differences of 17 and 88 mHa with respect to exact energies were found for excited states by using the qEOM-VQE and VQD algorithms, respectively, to perform simulations on quantum devices without error mitigation. By utilizing state tomography to purify the quantum states and correct energy values, the large errors found for unmitigated results could be improved to differences of, at most, 4 mHa with respect to exact values. Consequently, excellent agreement could be found between values of ΔEST predicted by quantum simulations and those found in experiments.

Currently available noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices are limited by the number of qubits that can be used for quantum chemistry calculations on molecules. We show herein that the number of qubits required for simulations on a quantum computer can be reduced by limiting the number of orbitals in the active space. Thus, we have utilized ansätze that approximate exact classical matrix eigenvalue decomposition methods (Full Configuration Interaction). Such methods are appropriate for computations with the Variational Quantum Eigensolver algorithm to perform computational investigations on the rearrangement of the lithium superoxide dimer with both quantum simulators and quantum devices. These results demonstrate that, even with a limited orbital active space, quantum simulators are capable of obtaining energy values that are similar to the exact ones. However, calculations on quantum hardware underestimate energies even after the application of readout error mitigation.

No abstract