On-the-fly Tailoring towards a Rational Ansatz Design for Digital Quantum Simulations

Abstract: Recent advancements in quantum information and quantum technology has stimulated a good deal of interest in the development of quantum algorithms for energetics and properties of many-fermionic systems. While the variational quantum eigensolver is the most optimal algorithm in the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum era, it is imperative to develop low depth quantum circuits that are physically realizable in quantum devices. Within the unitary coupled cluster framework, we develop COMPASS, a disentangled ansatz construction protocol that can dynamically tailor an optimal ansatz using the one and two-body cluster operators and a selection of rank-two scatterers. The construction of the ansatz may potentially be performed in parallel quantum architecture through energy sorting and operator commutativity prescreening. With significant reduction in the circuit depth towards the simulation of molecular strong correlation, COMPASS is shown to be highly accurate and resilient to the noisy circumstances of the near-term quantum hardware.