The Best of Both Worlds: Optimizing Quantum Hardware Resources with Classical Stochastic Methods
Maria-Andreea Filip, Nathan Fitzpatrick, David Muñoz Ramo, Alex J. W. Thom · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2021
Unitary Coupled Cluster (UCC) approaches are an appealing route to utilising quantum hardware to perform quantum chemistry calculations, as quantum computers can in principle perform UCC calculations in a polynomially scaling fashion, as compared to the exponential scaling required on classical computers. Current noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computers are limited by both hardware capacity in number of logical qubits and the noise introduced by the deep circuits required for UCC calculations using the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) approach. We present a combined classical--quantum approach where a stochastic classical UCC pre-processing step is used to determine the important excitations in the UCC ansatz. The reduced number of selected excitations are then used in a UCC-based VQE calculation. This approach gives a systematically improvable approximation, and we show that significant reductions in quantum resources can be achieved, with sub-milliHartree errors in the CH$_2$, N$_2$ and N$_2$H$_2$ molecules.