PANSATZ: Pulse-based Ansatz for Variational Quantum Algorithms

Abstract: We develop and implement a novel pulse-based ansatz, which we call PANSATZ, for more efficient and accurate implementations of variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) on today's noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers. Our approach is applied to quantum chemistry. Specifically, finding the ground-state energy associated with the electron configuration problem, using the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm for several molecules. We manage to achieve chemical accuracy both in simulation for several molecules and on one of IBM's NISQ devices for the $H_2$ molecule in the STO-3G basis. Our results are compared to a gate-based ansatz and show significant latency reduction - up to $7\times$ shorter ansatz schedules. We also show that this ansatz has structured adaptivity to the entanglement level required by the problem.