Iterative qubit-excitation based variational quantum eigensolver

Molecular simulations with the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) are a promising application for emerging noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers. Constructing accurate molecular ansatze that are easy to optimize and implemented by shallow quantum circuits is crucial for the successful implementation of such simulations. Ansatze are, generally, constructed as series of fermionic-excitation evolutions. Instead, we demonstrate the usefulness of constructing ansatze with ``qubit-excitation evolutions', which, contrary to fermionic excitation evolutions, obey ``qubit commutation relations'. We show that qubit excitation evolutions, despite the lack of some of the physical features of fermionic excitation evolutions, accurately construct ansatze, while requiring asymptotically fewer gates. Utilizing qubit excitation evolutions, we introduce the iterative qubit excitation based VQE (IQEB-VQE) algorithm. The IQEB-VQE performs molecular simulations using a problem-tailored ansatz, grown iteratively by appending evolutions of single and double qubit excitation operators. By performing numerical simulations for small molecules, we benchmark the IQEB-VQE, and compare it against other competitive VQE algorithms. In terms of circuit efficiency and time complexity, we find that the IQEB-VQE systematically outperforms the previously most circuit-efficient, practically scalable VQE algorithms.