Periodic plane-wave electronic structure calculations on quantum computers

Abstract

A procedure for defining virtual spaces, and the periodic one-electron and two-electron integrals, for plane-wave second quantized Hamiltonians has been developed, and it was validated using full configuration interaction (FCI) calculations, as well as executions of variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) circuits on Quantinuum’s ion trap quantum computers accessed through Microsoft’s Azure Quantum service. This work is an extension to periodic systems of a new class of algorithms in which the virtual spaces were generated by optimizing orbitals from small pairwise CI Hamiltonians, which we term as correlation optimized virtual orbitals with the abbreviation COVOs. In this extension, the integration of the first Brillouin zone is automatically incorporated into the two-electron integrals. With these procedures, we have been able to derive virtual spaces, containing only a few orbitals, that were able to capture a significant amount of correlation. The focus in this manuscript is on comparing the simulations of small molecules calculated with plane-wave basis sets with large periodic unit cells at the $$\Gamma$$ Γ -point, including images, to results for plane-wave basis sets with aperiodic unit cells. The results for this approach were promising, as we were able to obtain good agreement between periodic and aperiodic results for an LiH molecule. Calculations performed on the Quantinuum H1-1 quantum computer produced surprisingly good energies, in which the error mitigation played a small role in the quantum hardware calculations and the (noisy) quantum simulator results. Using a modest number of circuit runs (500 shots), we reproduced the FCI values for the 1 COVO Hamiltonian with an error of 11 milliHartree, which is expected to improve with a larger number of circuit runs.