Scalable Quantum Simulation of Molecular Energies
Abstract
We report the first electronic structure calculation performed on a quantum computer without exponentially costly precompilation. We use a programmable array of superconducting qubits to compute the energy surface of molecular hydrogen using two distinct quantum algorithms. First, we experimentally execute the unitary coupled cluster method using the variational quantum eigensolver. Our efficient implementation predicts the correct dissociation energy to within chemical accuracy of the numerically exact result. Second, we experimentally demonstrate the canonical quantum algorithm for chemistry, which consists of Trotterization and quantum phase estimation. We compare the experimental performance of these approaches to show clear evidence that the variational quantum eigensolver is robust to certain errors. This error tolerance inspires hope that variational quantum simulations of classically intractable molecules may be viable in the near future.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1512.06860,
title = {Scalable Quantum Simulation of Molecular Energies},
author = {P. J. J. O'Malley and R. Babbush and I. D. Kivlichan and J. Romero and J. R. McClean and R. Barends and J. Kelly and P. Roushan and A. Tranter and N. Ding and B. Campbell and Y. Chen and Z. Chen and B. Chiaro and A. Dunsworth and A. G. Fowler and E. Jeffrey and A. Megrant and J. Y. Mutus and C. Neill and C. Quintana and D. Sank and A. Vainsencher and J. Wenner and T. C. White and P. V. Coveney and P. J. Love and H. Neven and A. Aspuru-Guzik and J. M. Martinis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.06860},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
13 pages, 7 figures. This revision is to correct an error in the coefficients of identity in Table 1