Orbital transformations to reduce the 1-norm of the electronic structure Hamiltonian for quantum computing applications
Emiel Koridon, Saad Yalouz, Bruno Senjean, Francesco Buda, Thomas E. O’Brien, Lucas Visscher · Physical Review Research · 2021
Reducing the complexity of quantum algorithms to treat quantum chemistry problems is essential to demonstrate an eventual quantum advantage of noisy-intermediate scale quantum devices over their classical counterpart. Significant improvements have been made recently to simulate the time-evolution operator $U(t)={e}^{i\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\mathcal{H}}t}$, where $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\mathcal{H}}$ is the electronic structure Hamiltonian, or to simulate $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\mathcal{H}}$ directly (when written as a linear combination of unitaries) by using block encoding or qubitization techniques. A fundamental measure quantifying the practical implementation complexity of these quantum algorithms is the so-called 1-norm of the qubit representation of the Hamiltonian, which can be reduced by writing the Hamiltonian in factorized or tensor-hypercontracted forms, for instance. In this paper, we investigate the effect of classical preoptimization of the electronic structure Hamiltonian representation, via single-particle basis transformation, on the 1-norm. Specifically, we employ several localization schemes and benchmark the 1-norm of several systems of different sizes (number of atoms and active space sizes). We also derive a formula for the 1-norm as a function of the electronic integrals and use this quantity as a cost function for an orbital-optimization scheme that improves over localization schemes. This paper gives more insights about the importance of the 1-norm in quantum computing for quantum chemistry and provides simple ways of decreasing its value to reduce the complexity of quantum algorithms.