Implementing the Variational Quantum Eigensolver for Materials
Date
2024
Authors
Smith, Clayton
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Victoria
Abstract
'In the past few years quantum computers have seen considerable interest from fields which have problems which are computationally expensive to solve with classical computers. One area that has been a major of source of this interest is the simulation of chemical systems. Materials are one type of system that is important to a variety of industries such as renewable energy and medicine. Among the obstacles faced in simulating materials, materials can have properties which are challenging to calculate on classical computers. The promise of quantum computing for improving the exactness of chemical calculations has been shown with a number of methods for a variety of systems. One such method which has previously been used for materials is the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE). However work doing this is still fairly scarce and also typically uses closed source/paid software or does not publish detailed code. The goal of this research is to implement VQE for materials using the python package Tangelo. This implementation will then be used to perform calculations on simple systems to compare this implementation with existing results.
Description
Keywords
computational chemistry, Quantum computing, variational quantum eigensolver, theoretical chemistry