Band structure is a cornerstone to understand electronic properties of materials. Accurate band structure calculations using a high-level quantum-chemistry theory can be computationally very expensive. It is promising to speed up such calculations with a quantum computer. In this study, we present a quantum algorithm for band structure calculation based on the equation-of-motion (EOM) theory. First, we introduce a new variational quantum eigensolver algorithm named ADAPT-C for ground-state quantum simulation of solids, where the wave function is built adaptively from a complete set of anti-Hermitian operators. Then, on top of the ADAPT-C ground state, quasiparticle energies and the band structure can be calculated using the EOM theory in a quantum-subspace-expansion (QSE) style, where the projected excitation operators guarantee that the killer condition is satisfied. As a proof of principle, such an EOM-ADAPT-C protocol is used to calculate the band structures of silicon and diamond using a quantum computer simulator.
@article{arxiv.2109.01318,
title = {A Quantum Algorithm to Calculate Band Structure at the EOM Level of Theory},
author = {Yi Fan and Jie Liu and Zhenyu Li and Jinlong Yang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.01318},
year = {2021}
}