Chemical simulation is an exciting and challenging application for near-term quantum devices due to its societal importance and demanding accuracy requirements. Building up robust quantum chemical simulations requires perfecting algorithmic components on classical and quantum devices. In this talk I describe ubiquitous circuit primitives for chemical simulation and experimentally demonstrate their performance on Google’s Sycamore chip. To attain chemical accuracy we consider optimal circuit and gate compilations accounting for coherent gate errors along with reduced density matrix error mitigation strategies. Combining error mitigation strategies with variational relaxation of circuit parameters allows us to computationally resolve a model chemical mechanism for the first time on a quantum device. To our knowledge these experiments are the largest chemistry calculations performed on quantum computers to date.

The new frontier of chemical simulation on quantum resources

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.