Solving the electronic structure problem using the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) technique involves measurement of the Hamiltonian expectation value. Current hardware can perform only projective single-qubit measurements, and thus, the Hamiltonian expectation value is obtained by measuring parts of the Hamiltonian rather than the full Hamiltonian. This restriction makes the measurement process inefficient because the number of terms in the Hamiltonian grows as O(N 4 ) with the size of the system, N . To optimize VQE measurement one can try to group as many Hamiltonian terms as possible for their simultaneous measurement. Single-qubit measurements allow one to group only the terms commuting within corresponding single-qubit subspaces or qubitwise commuting. We found that qubit-wise commutativity between the Hamiltonian terms can be expressed as a graph and the problem of the optimal grouping is equivalent of finding a minimum clique cover (MCC) for the Hamiltonian graph. The MCC problem is NP-hard but there exist several polynomial heuristic algorithms to solve it approximately. Several of these heuristics were tested in this work for a set of molecular electronic Hamiltonians. On average, grouping qubit-wise commuting terms reduced the number of operators to measure three times compared to the total number of terms in the considered Hamiltonians.

To obtain estimates of electronic energies, the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) technique performs separate measurements for multiple parts of the system Hamiltonian. Current quantum hardware is restricted to projective single-qubit measurements, and thus, only parts of the Hamiltonian which form mutually qubit-wise commuting groups can be measured simultaneously. The number of such groups in the electronic structure Hamiltonians grows as N 4 , where N is the number of qubits, and thus puts serious restrictions on the size of the systems that can be studied. Using a partitioning of the system Hamiltonian as a linear combination of unitary operators we found a circuit formulation of the VQE algorithm that allows one to measure a group of fully anti-commuting terms of the Hamiltonian in a single series of single-qubit measurements. Compared to previously used grouping of Hamiltonian terms based on their qubit-wise commutativity, the unitary partitioning provides at least an N -fold reduction in the number of measurable groups.