Variational quantum eigensolver(VQE) typically minimizes energy with hybrid quantum-classical optimization, which aims to find the ground state. Here, we propose a VQE by minimizing energy variance, which is called as variance-VQE(VVQE). The VVQE can be viewed as an self-verifying eigensolver for arbitrary eigenstate by designing, since an eigenstate for a Hamiltonian should have zero energy variance. We demonstrate properties and advantages of VVQE for solving a set of excited states with quantum chemistry problems. Remarkably, we show that optimization of a combination of energy and variance may be more efficient to find low-energy excited states than those of minimizing energy or variance alone. We further reveal that the optimization can be boosted with stochastic gradient descent by Hamiltonian sampling, which uses only a few terms of the Hamiltonian and thus significantly reduces the quantum resource for evaluating variance and its gradients.
@article{arxiv.2006.15781,
title = {Variational quantum eigensolvers by variance minimization},
author = {Dan-Bo Zhang and Zhan-Hao Yuan and Tao Yin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.15781},
year = {2020}
}