Alleviating the Sparse Matrix Scaling Bottleneck in Adaptive VQE via High-Order Taylor State Evolution

Abstract

The Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) is a leading algorithm for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, but its adaptive variants (e.g., ADAPT-VQE) suffer from severe classical simulation bottlenecks during the ansatz growth phase. Representing and exponentiating pool operators for multi-qubit systems constructs massive sparse matrices that quickly scale to millions of elements, choking classical memory bandwidth and CPU/GPU cycle capacity. In this work, we present a resource-efficient software-layer framework that completely bypasses dense matrix exponentiation by evaluating state updates through a deterministic fifth-order (O(5)) Taylor series expansion. This approach reframes the costly unitary evolution into a chained sequence of five lightweight, successive sparse matrix-vector multiplications scaling strictly as O(Nz), where Nz is the number of non-zero elements. We validate our framework using equilibrium BeH2 (14 qubits), equilibrium H2O (12 qubits), and strongly correlated asymmetrically stretched H2O molecular profiles under both Jordan-Wigner (JW) and Bravyi-Kitaev (BK) transformations. The simulation results demonstrate that the O(5) truncation maintains exceptional numerical fidelity, retaining a state fidelity > 0.999999 and matching absolute ground state energies down to subchemical accuracy, while effortlessly navigating matrix spaces exceeding 268 million structural elements. This framework provides a scalable, high-performance pathway for executing deep variational simulations on hardware platforms with constrained computational budgets.