Towards Perturbation Theory Methods on a Quantum Computer

Abstract: Perturbation theory (PT) might be one of the most powerful and fruitful tools for both physicists and chemists, which evoked an explosion of applications with the blooming of atomic and subatomic physics. Even though PT is well-used today, techniques for PT are significantly lacking in quantum computing. Here we present a quantum circuit estimating both the energy and eigenstates corrections with PT methods, which we claim is far superior to the classical version when estimating the second order energy correction. Our approach is further demonstrated with an application on the extended Hubbard model, where numerical simulation based on qiskit is also presented. Unlike the popular quantum variational circuit, there is no training or optimizing process in our circuit, and all parameters are derived from the unperturbed Hamiltonian. Our work offers a new approach to studying complex systems with quantum devices, which might shed light on the quantum implementation of the more intricate methods based on PT.