Calculation of Molecular Vibrational Spectra on a Quantum Annealer

Until recently molecular energy calculations using quantum computing hardware have been limited to gate-based quantum computers. In this paper, a new methodology is presented to calculate the vibrational spectrum of a molecule on a quantum annealer. The key idea of the method is a mapping of the ground state variational problem onto an Ising or quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem by expressing the expansion coefficients using spins or qubits. The algorithm is general and represents a new revolutionary approach for solving the real symmetric eigenvalue problem on a quantum annealer. The method is applied to two chemically important molecules: O₂ (oxygen) and O₃ (ozone). The lowest two vibrational states of these molecules are computed using both a hardware quantum annealer and a software based classical annealer. Extension of the algorithm to higher dimensions is explicitly demonstrated for an N-dimensional harmonic oscillator (N ≤ 5). The algorithm scales exponentially with dimensionality if a direct product basis is used but will exhibit polynomial scaling for a nondirect product basis.