Variational quantum eigensolver with fewer qubits

Abstract

We propose a qubit efficient scheme to study ground-state properties of quantum many-body systems on near-term noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers. One can obtain a tensor network representation of the ground state using a number of qubits smaller than the physical degrees of freedom. By increasing the number of qubits, one can exponentially increase the bond dimension of the tensor network variational ansatz on a quantum computer. Moreover, we construct circuits blocks which respect U(1) and SU(2) symmetries of the physical system and show that they can significantly speed up the training process and alleviate the gradient vanishing problem. To demonstrate the feasibility of the qubit efficient variational quantum eigensolver in a practical setting, we perform first-principles classical simulation of differentiable programming of the circuits. Using only six qubits, one can obtain the ground state of a 4×4 square lattice frustrated Heisenberg model with fidelity over 97%. Arbitrarily-long-range correlations can also be measured on the same circuit after variational optimization.