Entanglement-informed construction of variational quantum circuits

The variational quantum eigensolver is a promising tool for simulating ground states of quantum many-body systems on noisy quantum computers. Its effectiveness relies heavily on the ansatz, which must be both hardware-efficient for implementation on noisy hardware and problem-specific to avoid local minima and convergence problems. In this article, we explore entanglement-informed ansatz schemes that naturally emerge from specific models, aiming to balance accuracy with minimal use of two-qubit entangling gates. We investigate three models of quasi-1D Hamiltonians focusing on entanglement barriers and long-range interactions. We find that including the entanglement structure in the parameterized quantum circuit reduces the resources necessary to achieve a given accuracy. A better assessment is obtained by analyzing how the ansatz captures the entanglement spectrum. Our comprehensive analysis provides a new perspective on the design of ansätze based on the expected entanglement structure of the approximated state.