Towards near-term quantum simulation of materials

Understand

Simulation of materials is one of the most promising applications of quantum computers.

• On near-term hardware the crucial constraint on these simulations is circuit depth.
• Many quantum simulation algorithms rely on a layer of unitary evolutions generated by each term in a Hamiltonian.
• This appears in time-dynamics as a single Trotter step, and in variational quantum eigensolvers under the Hamiltonian variational ansatz as a single ansatz layer.