Molecular excited state calculations with the QEB-ADAPT-VQE

Abstract: Calculations of molecular spectral properties, like photodissociation rates and absorption bands, rely on knowledge of the excited state energies of the molecule of interest. Protocols based on the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) are promising candidates to calculate such energies on emerging noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computers. The successful implementation of these protocols on NISQ computers, relies on ans\"atze that can accurately approximate the molecular states and that can be implemented by shallow quantum circuits. In this paper, we introduce the excited qubit-excitation-based adaptive (e-QEB-ADAPT)-VQE protocol to calculate molecular excited state energies. The e-QEB-ADAPT-VQE constructs efficient problem-tailored ans\"atze by iteratively appending evolutions of qubit excitation operators. The e-QEB-ADAPT-VQE is an adaptation of the QEB-ADAPT-VQE protocol, which is designed to be independent on the choice of an initial reference state. We perform classical numerical simulations for LiH and BeH$_2$ to benchmark the performance of the e-QEB-ADAPT-VQE. We demonstrate that the e-QEB-ADAPT-VQE can construct highly accurate ans\"atze that require at least an order of magnitude fewer $CNOT$s than standard fixed UCC ans\"atze, such as the UCCSD and the GUCCSD.