A variational quantum eigensolver for dynamic correlation functions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modified variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) for directly computing dynamic correlation functions, enabling frequency domain analysis of quantum systems on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.

Contribution

The authors develop a VQE-based method to calculate zero-temperature dynamic correlation functions, allowing frequency resolution without increasing gate depth, suitable for near-term quantum hardware.

Findings

Successfully applied to dihydrogen and lithium hydride molecules

Enables frequency domain analysis with limited quantum resources

Demonstrates potential for studying correlated quantum systems

Abstract

Recent practical approaches for the use of current generation noisy quantum devices in the simulation of quantum many-body problems have been dominated by the use of a variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). These coupled quantum-classical algorithms leverage the ability to perform many repeated measurements to avoid the currently prohibitive gate depths often required for exact quantum algorithms, with the restriction of a parameterized circuit to describe the states of interest. In this work, we show how the calculation of zero-temperature dynamic correlation functions defining the linear response characteristics of quantum systems can also be recast into a modified VQE algorithm, which can be incorporated into the current variational quantum infrastructure. This allows for these important physical expectation values describing the dynamics of the system to be directly converged on the frequency axis, and they approach exactness over all frequencies as the flexibility of the parameterization increases. The frequency resolution hence does not explicitly scale with gate depth, which is approximately twice as deep as a ground state VQE. We apply the method to compute the single-particle Green's function of ab initio dihydrogen and lithium hydride molecules, and demonstrate the use of a practical active space embedding approach to extend to larger systems. While currently limited by the fidelity of two-qubit gates, whose number is increased compared to the ground state algorithm on current devices, we believe the approach shows potential for the extraction of frequency dynamics of correlated systems on near-term quantum processors.