Using Quantum Annealers to Calculate Ground State Properties of Molecules

Abstract

Quantum annealers are an alternative approach to quantum computing which make use of the adiabatic theorem to efficiently find the ground state of a physically realizable Hamiltonian. Such devices are currently commercially available and have been successfully applied to several combinatorial and discrete optimization problems. However, the application of quantum annealers to problems in chemistry remains a relatively sparse area of research due to the difficulty in mapping molecular systems to the Ising model Hamiltonian. In this paper we review two different methods for finding the ground state of molecular Hamiltonians using Ising model-based quantum annealers. In addition, we compare the relative effectiveness of each method by calculating the binding energies, bond lengths, and bond angles of the H+3and H2O molecules and mapping their potential energy curves. We also assess the resource requirements of each method by determining the number of qubits and computation time required to simulate each molecule using various parameter values. While each of these methods is capable of accurately predicting the ground state properties of small molecules, we find that they are still outperformed by modern classical algorithms and that the scaling of the resource requirements remains a challenge.

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Electronic structure with direct diagonalization on a D-Wave quantum annealer
• Tensorized Pauli decomposition algorithm
• The Basics of Quantum Computing for Chemists
• Preparing ground states of the XXZ model using the quantum annealing with inductively coupled superconducting flux qubits
• First-quantized adiabatic time evolution for the ground state of a many-electron system and the optimal nuclear configuration
• Electronic Structure Theory with Molecular Point Group Symmetries on Quantum Annealers
• Multi-tasking through quantum annealing