Quantum Simulations of Chemical Reactions: Achieving Accuracy with NISQ Devices

Abstract

Quantum computing is viewed as a promising technology because of its potential for polynomial growth in complexity, in contrast to the exponential growth observed in its classical counterparts. In the current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), a hybrid variational algorithm, is utilized to simulate molecules using qubits and calculate molecular properties. However, simulating a chemical reaction to compute the reaction energy using VQE algorithm has not yet reached chemical accuracy relative to the benchmark computational chemistry methods due to limitations such as the number of qubits, circuit depth, and noise introduced within the model. To address this issue, we propose the definition of different active spaces for studying chemical reactions, incorporating irreducible representations of both the ground and excited states of the molecules. Our results demonstrate that this approach achieves chemical accuracy in predicting the reaction energy for various reactions. For all reactions studied, the difference in reaction energies between conventional computational chemistry methods and the quantum-classical hybrid VQE algorithm is less than 1 kcal/mol. Furthermore, our analysis simplifies the process of selecting active spaces and electrons for each reaction, reducing it to a single optimal combination that ensures the chemical accuracy for each reaction.