Quantum computers have the potential to advance material design and drug discovery by performing costly electronic structure calculations. A critical aspect of this application requires optimizing the limited resources of the quantum hardware. Here, we experimentally demonstrate an end-to-end pipeline that focuses on minimizing quantum resources while maintaining accuracy. Using density matrix embedding theory as a problem decomposition technique, and an ion-trap quantum computer, we simulate a ring of 10 hydrogen atoms without freezing any electrons. The originally 20-qubit system is decomposed into 10 two-qubit problems, making it amenable to currently available hardware. Combining this decomposition with a qubit coupled cluster circuit ansatz, circuit optimization, and density matrix purification, we accurately reproduce the potential energy curve in agreement with the full configuration interaction energy in the minimal basis set. Our experimental results are an early demonstration of the potential for problem decomposition to accurately simulate large molecules on quantum hardware.

Quantum computers have the potential to perform accurate and efficient electronic structure calculations, enabling the simulation of properties of materials. However, today’s noisy, intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices have a limited number of qubits and gate operations due to the presence of errors. Here, we propose a systematically improvable end-to-end pipeline to alleviate these limitations. Our proposed resource-efficient pipeline combines problem decomposition techniques for compact molecular representations, circuit optimization methods for compilation, solving the eigenvalue problem on advanced quantum hardware, and error-mitigation techniques in post-processing the results. Using the density matrix embedding theory for compact representation, and an ion-trap quantum computer, we simulate a ring of 10 hydrogen atoms taking into account all electrons equally and explicitly in the electronic structure calculation. In our experiment, we simulated the largest molecular system on a quantum computer within chemical accuracy with respect to total molecular energy calculated by the full CI method. Our methods reduce the number of qubits required for high-accuracy quantum simulations by an order of magnitude in the present work, enabling the simulation of larger, more industrially relevant molecules using NISQ devices. They are further systematically improvable as devices’ computational capacity continues to grow.

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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 state preparation (ASP) to generate an accurate state more efficiently compared to existing adiabatic methods. The standard ASP 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 ASP, 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. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd on behalf of the Institute of Physics and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft New J. Phys. 22 (2020) 053023 S Matsuura et aldifficulty faced in these experiments is in executing operations without losing relevant quantum coherence. Whereas quantum error correction will make it possible to perform an unlimited number of operations, the required resources are large, well beyond the capabilities of current hardware. Therefore, the development of methods that require less-stringent quantum coherence is essential for near-term quantum devices. A subset of the authors of the present work have previously investigated the idea of combining problem decomposition techniques in conjunction with quantum computing approaches [13]. Quantum-classical hybrid algorithms, such as the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) [14][15][16], are suitable from this perspective. In addition to the algorithm requiring a shorter coherence time, the VQE has demonstrated robustness against systematic control errors [6,7,10].Thus far, most of the experiments that have made use of the VQE and phase estimation algorithms (PEA) [17,18] have been performed within the framework of gate model quantum computation. An alternative framework is adiabatic quantum computation (AQC) [19][20][2...

Tangelo (https link) is an open-source Python software package for the development of end-to-end chemistry workflows on quantum computers, released under Apache 2.0 license. It aims to support the design of successful experiments on quantum hardware, and to facilitate advances in quantum algorithm development. The software enables quick exploration of different approaches by assembling reusable building blocks and algorithms, with the flexibility to let users introduce their own. Tangelo is backend-agnostic and enables switching between various backends (Braket, Qiskit, Qulacs, Azure Quantum, QDK, Cirq...) with minimal changes in the code. The package can be used to explore quantum computing applications such as open-shell systems, excited states, or more industrially-relevant systems by leveraging problem decomposition at scale. This paper outlines the design choices, philosophy, and main features of Tangelo.