arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Basil Ibrahim.
Over the past decade, the Python-based Simulations of Chemistry Framework (PySCF) has developed into a widely used open-source platform for electronic structure theory and quantum chemical method development. This article reviews the major advances since the previous overview in 2020, covering new modules and methodology, infrastructure changes, and performance benchmarks.
We combine classical heuristics with partial shadow tomography to enable efficient protocols for extracting information from correlated ab initio electronic systems encoded on quantum devices. By proposing the use of a correlation energy functional and sampling of a polynomial set of excitation amplitudes of the quantum state, we can demonstrate an almost two order of magnitude reduction in required number of shots for a given statistical error in the energy estimate, as well as observing a linear scaling to accessible system sizes. Furthermore, we find a high-degree of noise resilience of these estimators on real quantum devices, with up to an order of magnitude increase in the tolerated noise compared to traditional techniques. While these approaches are expected to break down asymptotically, we find strong evidence that these large system arguments do not prevent algorithmic advantage from these simple protocols in many systems of interest. We further extend this to consider the extraction of beyond-energetic properties by mapping to a coupled cluster surrogate model, as well as a natural combination within a quantum embedding framework. This embedding framework avoids the unstable self-consistent requirements of previous approaches, enabling application of quantum solvers to realistic correlated materials science, where we demonstrate the volume-dependence of the spin gap of Nickel Oxide.
Quantum embedding is an appealing route to fragment a large interacting quantum system into several smaller auxiliary `cluster' problems to exploit the locality of the correlated physics. In this work we critically review approaches to recombine these fragmented solutions in order to compute non-local expectation values, including the total energy. Starting from the democratic partitioning of expectation values used in density matrix embedding theory, we motivate and develop a number of alternative approaches, numerically demonstrating their efficiency and improved accuracy as a function of increasing cluster size for both energetics and non-local two-body observables in molecular and solid state systems. These approaches consider the $N$-representability of the resulting expectation values via an implicit global wave~function across the clusters, as well as the importance of including contributions to expectation values spanning multiple fragments simultaneously, thereby alleviating the fundamental locality approximation of the embedding. We clearly demonstrate the value of these introduced functionals for reliable extraction of observables and robust and systematic convergence as the cluster size increases, allowing for significantly smaller clusters to be used for a desired accuracy compared to traditional approaches in ab initio wave~function quantum embedding.