Computation of the Green's function is crucial to study the properties of quantum many-body systems such as strongly correlated systems. Although the high-precision calculation of the Green's function is a notoriously challenging task on classical computers, the development of quantum computers may enable us to compute the Green's function with high accuracy even for classically-intractable large-scale systems. Here, we propose an efficient method to compute the real-time Green's function based on the local variational quantum compilation (LVQC) algorithm, which simulates the time evolution of a large-scale quantum system using a low-depth quantum circuit constructed through optimization on a smaller-size subsystem. Our method requires shallow quantum circuits to calculate the Green's function and can be utilized on both near-term noisy intermediate-scale and long-term fault-tolerant quantum computers depending on the computational resources we have. We perform a numerical simulation of the Green's function for the one- and two-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model up to 4×4 sites lattice (32 qubits) and demonstrate the validity of our protocol compared to a standard method based on the Trotter decomposition. We finally present a detailed estimation of the gate count for the large-scale Fermi-Hubbard model, which also illustrates the advantage of our method over the Trotter decomposition.

The analysis of a chemical reaction along the ground state potential energy surface in conjunction with an unknown spin state is challenging because electronic states must be separately computed several times using different spin multiplicities to find the lowest energy state. However, in principle, the ground state could be obtained with just a single calculation using a quantum computer without specifying the spin multiplicity in advance. In the present work, ground state potential energy curves for PtCO were calculated as a proof-of-concept using a variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm. This system exhibits a singlet-triplet crossover as a consequence of the interaction between Pt and CO. VQE calculations using a statevector simulator were found to converge to a singlet state in the bonding region, while a triplet state was obtained at the dissociation limit. Calculations performed using an actual quantum device provided potential energies within ±2 kcal/mol of the simulated energies after adopting error mitigation techniques. The spin multiplicities in the bonding and dissociation regions could be clearly distinguished even in the case of a small number of shots. The results of this study suggest that quantum computing can be a powerful tool for the analysis of the chemical reactions of systems for which the spin multiplicity of the ground state and variations in this parameter are not known in advance.

We propose quantum-selected configuration interaction (QSCI), a class of hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for calculating the ground- and excited-state energies of many-electron Hamiltonians on noisy quantum devices. Suppose that an approximate ground state can be prepared on a quantum computer either by variational quantum eigensolver or by some other method. Then, by sampling the state in the computational basis, which is hard for classical computation in general, one can identify the electron configurations that are important for reproducing the ground state. The Hamiltonian in the subspace spanned by those important configurations is diagonalized on classical computers to output the ground-state energy and the corresponding eigenvector. The excited-state energies can be obtained similarly. The result is robust against statistical and physical errors because the noisy quantum devices are used only to define the subspace, and the resulting ground-state energy strictly satisfies the variational principle even in the presence of such errors. The expectation values of various other operators can also be estimated for obtained eigenstates with no additional quantum cost, since the explicit eigenvectors in the subspaces are known. We verified our proposal by numerical simulations, and demonstrated it on a quantum device for an 8-qubit molecular Hamiltonian. The proposed algorithms are potentially feasible to tackle some challenging molecules by exploiting quantum devices with several tens of qubits, assisted by high-performance classical computing resources for diagonalization.

We propose an efficient and almost optimal scheme for measuring molecular Hamiltonians in quantum chemistry on quantum computers, which requires 2N² distinct measurements in the leading order with N being the number of molecular orbitals. It achieves the state-of-the-art by improving a previous proposal by Bonet-Monroig et al. [Phys. Rev. X 10, 031064 (2020)] which exhibits 17N²/6 scaling in the leading order. We develop a novel method based on a finite projective plane to construct sets of simultaneously-measurable operators contained in molecular Hamiltonians. Each measurement only requires a depth-O(N) circuit consisting of O(N²) one- and two-qubit gates under the Jordan-Wigner and parity mapping, assuming the linear connectivity of qubits on quantum hardwares. Because evaluating expectation values of molecular Hamiltonians is one of the major bottlenecks in the applications of quantum devices to quantum chemistry, our finding is expected to accelerate such applications.

Fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC) is essential to robustly implement quantum algorithms and thus to maximize advantages of quantum computers. In this context, a quantum circuit is decomposed into universal gates that can be fault-tolerantly implemented, for example, Clifford+T gates. Here, T gate is usually regarded as an essential resource for quantum computation because its action cannot be simulated efficiently on classical computers. Practically, it is highly likely that only a limited number of T gates are available in the near future due to its experimental difficulty of fault-tolerant implementation. In this paper, considering this Pre-FTQC era, we investigate Clifford+T decomposition with a limited budget of T gates and propose a new model of the error of such decomposition. More concretely, we propose an algorithm to generate the most accurate Clifford+T-gate decomposition of a given single-qubit rotation gate with a fixed number of T gates. We also propose to model the error of Clifford+T decomposition using well-known depolarizing noise by considering the average of the effects of the error. We numerically verified our model successfully explains the decomposition error for a wide variety of molecules using our decomposition algorithm. Thus, we shed light on a first-stage application of quantum computers from a practical point of view and fuel further research towards what quantum computation can achieve in the upcoming future.

In this paper, we propose a cost-reduced method for finite-temperature molecular dynamics on a near-term quantum computer, Quantum Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics (QCPMD). One of the most promising applications of near-term quantum computers is quantum chemistry. It has been expected that simulations of molecules via molecular dynamics can be also efficiently performed on near-term quantum computers by applying a promising near-term quantum algorithm of the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). However, this method may demand considerable computational costs to achieve a sufficient accuracy, and otherwise, statistical noise can significantly affect the results. To resolve these problems, we invent an efficient method for molecular time evolution inspired by Car-Parrinello method. In our method, parameters characterizing the quantum state evolve based on equations of motion instead of being optimized. Furthermore, by considering Langevin dynamics, we can make use of the intrinsic statistical noise. As an application of QCPMD, we propose an efficient method for vibrational frequency analysis of molecules in which we can use the results of the molecular dynamics calculated by QCPMD. Numerical experiments show that our method can precisely simulate the Langevin dynamics at the equilibrium state, and we can successfully predict a given molecule's eigen frequencies. Furthermore, in the numerical simulation, our method achieves a substantial cost reduction compared with molecular dynamics using the VQE. Our method achieves an efficient computation without using widely employed method of the VQE. In this sense, we open up a new possibility of molecular dynamics on near-term quantum computers. We expect our results inspire further invention of efficient near-term quantum algorithms for simulation of molecules.

We develop a quantum-classical hybrid algorithm to calculate the analytical second-order derivative of the energy for the orbital-optimized variational quantum eigensolver (OO-VQE), which is a method to calculate eigenenergies of a given molecular Hamiltonian by utilizing near-term quantum computers and classical computers. We show that all quantities required in the algorithm to calculate the derivative can be evaluated on quantum computers as standard quantum expectation values without using any ancillary qubits. We validate our formula by numerical simulations of quantum circuits for computing the polarizability of the water molecule, which is the second-order derivative of the energy with respect to the electric field. Moreover, the polarizabilities and refractive indices of thiophene and furan molecules are calculated as a testbed for possible industrial applications. We finally analyze the error-scaling of the estimated polarizabilities obtained by the proposed analytical derivative versus the numerical one obtained by the finite difference. Numerical calculations suggest that our analytical derivative may require fewer measurements (runs) on quantum computers than the numerical derivative to achieve the same fixed accuracy.

Implementing time evolution operators on quantum circuits is important for quantum simulation. However, the standard way, Trotterization, requires a huge numbers of gates to achieve desirable accuracy. Here, we propose a local variational quantum compilation (LVQC) algorithm, which allows to accurately and efficiently compile a time evolution operators on a large-scale quantum system by the optimization with smaller-size quantum systems. LVQC utilizes a subsystem cost function, which approximates the fidelity of the whole circuit, defined for each subsystem as large as approximate causal cones brought by the Lieb-Robinson (LR) bound. We rigorously derive its scaling property with respect to the subsystem size, and show that the optimization conducted on the subsystem size leads to the compilation of whole-system time evolution operators. As a result, LVQC runs with limited-size quantum computers or classical simulators that can handle such smaller quantum systems. For instance, finite-ranged and short-ranged interacting L-size systems can be compiled with O(L^0)- or O(logL)-size quantum systems depending on observables of interest. Furthermore, since this formalism relies only on the LR bound, it can efficiently construct time evolution operators of various systems in generic dimension involving finite-, short-, and long-ranged interactions. We also numerically demonstrate the LVQC algorithm for one-dimensional systems. Employing classical simulation by time-evolving block decimation, we succeed in compressing the depth of a time evolution operators up to 40 qubits by the compilation for 20 qubits. LVQC not only provides classical protocols for designing large-scale quantum circuits, but also will shed light on applications of intermediate-scale quantum devices in implementing algorithms in larger-scale quantum devices.

Measuring expectation values of observables is an essential ingredient in variational quantum algorithms. A practical obstacle is the necessity of a large number of measurements for statistical convergence to meet requirements of precision, such as chemical accuracy in the application to quantum chemistry computations. Here we propose an algorithm to estimate the expectation value based on its approximate expression as a weighted sum of classically-tractable matrix elements with some modulation, where the weight and modulation factors are evaluated by sampling appropriately prepared quantum states in the computational basis on quantum computers. Our algorithm is expected to require fewer measurements than conventional methods for a required statistical precision of the expectation value when a target quantum state is concentrated in particular computational basis states. We provide numerical comparisons of our method with existing ones for measuring electronic ground state energies (expectation values of electronic Hamiltonians for the lowest-energy states) of various small molecules. Numerical results show that our method can reduce the numbers of measurements to obtain the ground state energies for a targeted precision by several orders of magnitudes for molecules whose ground states are concentrated. Our results provide another route to measure expectation values of observables, which could accelerate the variational quantum algorithms.

A non-adiabatic nuclear wavepacket dynamics simulation of the H₂O⁺ de-excitation process is performed based on electronic structure calculations using the variational quantum eigensolver. The adiabatic potential energy surfaces and non-adiabatic coupling vectors are computed with algorithms for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, and time propagation is simulated with conventional methods for classical computers. The results of non-adiabatic transition dynamics from the B^~ state to A^~ state reproduce the trend reported in previous studies, which suggests that this quantum-classical hybrid scheme may be a useful application for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.