Clifford-efficient sparse state preparation for molecular wavefunctions
Sparse quantum state preparation concerns an $n$-qubit target state that is a superposition of only $d \ll 2^n$ computational basis states. Existing approaches exploit this sparsity by compressing these $d$ basis states and their amplitudes onto a smaller set of qubits, called the dense register, before expanding the prepared state to the full register. Rather than relying on the permutation-based compression used in prior work, we exploit affine relationships among the binary configurations over the finite field $\operatorname{GF}(2)$ to reduce both the non-Clifford gate count and the ancillary qubit count. Invertible affine transformations over $\operatorname{GF}(2)$, comprising Gaussian elimination and all-ones-row removal, first reduce the dense register from $n$ to the rank $r$ using only Clifford gates and no ancillary qubits. An optional binary encoding stage then trades additional Toffoli gates and ancillary qubits for further compression to the minimum $\lceil\log_2 d\rceil$ dense qubits needed to represent $d$ distinct configurations. For chemically relevant wavefunctions, such as those obtained from selected configuration interaction calculations, shared electronic excitation patterns produce many of these affine relationships, enabling substantial Clifford-only compression before binary encoding. Across the molecular benchmarks, our method requires the fewest ancillary qubits among the evaluated sparse state preparation methods while maintaining comparable non-Clifford gate counts when using binary encoding.