Hybrid quantum-classical approach for coupled-cluster Green's function theory

Abstract

The three key elements of a quantum simulation are state preparation, time evolution, and measurement. While the complexity scaling of time evolution and measurements are well known, many state preparation methods are strongly system-dependent and require prior knowledge of the system's eigenvalue spectrum. Here, we report on a quantum-classical implementation of the coupled-cluster Green's function (CCGF) method, which replaces explicit ground state preparation with the task of applying unitary operators to a simple product state. While our approach is broadly applicable to many models, we demonstrate it here for the Anderson impurity model (AIM). The method requires a number of $T$ gates that grows as $ \mathcal{O} \left(N^5 \right)$ per time step to calculate the impurity Green's function in the time domain, where $N$ is the total number of energy levels in the AIM. Since the number of $T$ gates is analogous to the computational time complexity of a classical simulation, we achieve an order of magnitude improvement over a classical CCGF calculation of the same order, which requires $ \mathcal{O} \left(N^6 \right)$ computational resources per time step.