Preserving Symmetries for Variational Quantum Eigensolvers in the Presence of Noise
George S. Barron, Bryan Gard, Orien J. Altman, Nicholas J. Mayhall, Edwin Barnes, Sophia E. Economou · Physical Review Applied · 2021
One of the most promising applications of noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers is the simulation of molecular Hamiltonians using the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). We show that encoding symmetries of the simulated Hamiltonian in the VQE ansatz reduces both classical and quantum resources compared to other widely available ansatze. Through simulations of the ${\mathrm{H}}_{2}$ molecule and of a Heisenberg model on a two-dimensional lattice, we verify that these improvements persist in the presence of noise. This is done using both real IBM devices and classical simulations. We also demonstrate how these techniques can be used to find molecular excited states of various symmetries using a noisy processor. We use error-mitigation techniques to further improve the quality of our results.