Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz (QAOA) Phase Diagrams and Applications for Quantum Chemistry

Understand

Determining Hamiltonian ground states and energies is a challenging task with many possible approaches on quantum computers.

• While variational quantum eigensolvers are popular approaches for near term hardware, adiabatic state preparation is an alternative that does not require noisy optimization of parameters.
• Beyond adiabatic schedules, QAOA is an important method for optimization problems.
• In this work we modify QAOA to apply to finding ground states of molecules and empirically evaluate the modified algorithm on several molecules.