Contextual Subspace Variational Quantum Eigensolver Calculation of the Dissociation Curve of Molecular Nitrogen on a Superconducting Quantum Computer

Abstract

In this work we present an experimental demonstration of the Contextual Subspace Variational Quantum Eigensolver on superconducting quantum hardware. In particular, we compute the potential energy curve for molecular nitrogen, where a dominance of static correlation in the dissociation limit proves challenging for many conventional quantum chemistry techniques. Our quantum simulations retain good agreement with the full configuration interaction energy in the chosen STO-3G basis, outperforming all benchmarked single-reference wavefunction techniques in capturing the bond-breaking appropriately. Moreover, our methodology is competitive with several multiconfigurational approaches, but at a considerable saving of quantum resource, meaning larger active spaces can be treated for a fixed qubit allowance. To achieve this result we deploy an error mitigation/suppression strategy comprised of dynamical decoupling, measurement-error mitigation and zero-noise extrapolation, in addition to circuit parallelization that not only provides passive averaging of noise but improves the effective shot-yield to reduce the measurement overhead. Furthermore, we introduce a modification to previous adaptive ansatz construction algorithms that incorporates hardware-awareness into our variational circuits to minimize the transpilation cost for the target qubit topology.