Euclidean time method in Generalized Eigenvalue Equation

Abstract

We develop the Euclidean time method of the variational quantum eigensolver for solving the generalized eigenvalue equation $A \ket{\phi_n} = \lambda_n B \ket{\phi_n}$, where $A$ and $B$ are hermitian operators, and $\ket{\phi_n}$ and $\lambda_n$ are called the eigenvector and the corresponding eigenvalue of this equation respectively. For the purpose we modify the usual Euclidean time formalism, which was developed for solving the time-independent Schr\"{o}dinger equation. We apply our formalism to three numerical examples for test. It is shown that our formalism works very well in all numerical examples. We also apply our formalism to the hydrogen atom and compute the electric polarizability. It turns out that our result is slightly less than that of the perturbation method.