Chemical Basis of Trotter-Suzuki Errors in Quantum Chemistry Simulation

Understand

Although the simulation of quantum chemistry is one of the most anticipated applications of quantum computing, the scaling of known upper bounds on the complexity of these algorithms is daunting.

• Prior work has bounded errors due to Trotterization in terms of the norm of the error operator and analyzed scaling with respect to the number of spin-orbitals.
• However, we find that these error bounds can be loose by up to sixteen orders of magnitude for some molecules.
• Furthermore, numerical results for small systems fail to reveal any clear correlation between ground state error and number of spin-orbitals.