Kristan Temme

Hardware-efficient variational quantum eigensolver for small molecules and quantum magnets

Quantum computers can be used to address electronic-structure problems and problems in materials science and condensed matter physics that can be formulated as interacting fermionic problems, problems which stretch the limits of existing high-performance computers. Finding exact solutions to such problems numerically has a computational cost that scales exponentially with the size of the system, and Monte Carlo methods are unsuitable owing to the fermionic sign problem. These limitations of classical computational methods have made solving even few-atom electronic-structure problems interesting for implementation using medium-sized quantum computers. Yet experimental implementations have so far been restricted to molecules involving only hydrogen and helium. Here we demonstrate the experimental optimization of Hamiltonian problems with up to six qubits and more than one hundred Pauli terms, determining the ground-state energy for molecules of increasing size, up to BeH2. We achieve this result by using a variational quantum eigenvalue solver (eigensolver) with efficiently prepared trial states that are tailored specifically to the interactions that are available in our quantum processor, combined with a compact encoding of fermionic Hamiltonians and a robust stochastic optimization routine. We demonstrate the flexibility of our approach by applying it to a problem of quantum magnetism, an antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model in an external magnetic field. In all cases, we find agreement between our experiments and numerical simulations using a model of the device with noise. Our results help to elucidate the requirements for scaling the method to larger systems and for bridging the gap between key problems in high-performance computing and their implementation on quantum hardware.

Graphene with geometrically induced vorticity

At half filling, the electronic structure of graphene can be modeled by a pair of free two-dimensional Dirac fermions. We explicitly demonstrate that in the presence of a geometrically induced gauge field an everywhere-real Kekulé modulation of the hopping matrix elements can correspond to a nonreal Higgs field with nontrivial vorticity. This provides a natural setting for fractionally charged vortices with localized zero modes. For fullerenelike molecules we employ the index theorem to demonstrate the existence of six low-lying states that do not depend strongly on the Kekulé-induced mass gap.

Preparing projected entangled pair states on a quantum computer.

We present a quantum algorithm to prepare injective projected entangled pair states (PEPS) on a quantum computer, a class of open tensor networks representing quantum states. The run time of our algorithm scales polynomially with the inverse of the minimum condition number of the PEPS projectors and, essentially, with the inverse of the spectral gap of the PEPSs parent Hamiltonian.

Error Mitigation for Short-Depth Quantum Circuits

Two schemes are presented that mitigate the effect of errors and decoherence in short-depth quantum circuits. The size of the circuits for which these techniques can be applied is limited by the rate at which the errors in the computation are introduced. Near-term applications of early quantum devices, such as quantum simulations, rely on accurate estimates of expectation values to become relevant. Decoherence and gate errors lead to wrong estimates of the expectation values of observables used to evaluate the noisy circuit. The two schemes we discuss are deliberately simple and do not require additional qubit resources, so to be as practically relevant in current experiments as possible. The first method, extrapolation to the zero noise limit, subsequently cancels powers of the noise perturbations by an application of Richardsons deferred approach to the limit. The second method cancels errors by resampling randomized circuits according to a quasiprobability distribution.

Necessity of an energy barrier for self-correction of Abelian quantum doubles

We rigorously establish an Arrhenius law for the mixing time of quantum doubles based on any Abelian groupZd. We have made the concept of the energy barrier therein mathe tically well-defined, it is related to the minimum energy cost the environment has to provide to t he system in order to produce a generalized Pauli error, maximized for any generalized Pauli errors, no t o ly logical operators. We evaluate this generalized energy barrier in Abelian quantum double models and find it to be a constant independent of system size. Thus, we rule out the possibility of entropic protection for this b road group of models.