Exploiting locality in quantum computation for quantum chemistry

Understand

Accurate prediction of chemical and material properties from first principles quantum chemistry is a challenging task on traditional computers.

• Recent developments in quantum computation offer a route towards highly accurate solutions with polynomial cost, however this solution still carries a large overhead.
• In this perspective, we aim to bring together known results about the locality of physical interactions from quantum chemistry with ideas from quantum computation.
• We show that the utilization of spatial locality combined with the Bravyi-Kitaev transformation offers an improvement in the scaling of known quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry and provide numerical examples to help illustrate this point.