Construction of Antisymmetric Variational Quantum States with Real Space Representation

Electronic state calculations using quantum computers are mostly based on the second quantized formulation, which is suitable for qubit representation. Another way to describe electronic states on a quantum computer is based on the first quantized formulation, which is expected to achieve smaller scaling with respect to the number of basis functions than the second quantized formulation. Among basis functions, a real space basis is an attractive option for quantum dynamics simulations in the fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC) era. A major difficulty in the first quantized algorithm with a real space basis is state preparation for many-body electronic systems. This difficulty stems from the antisymmetry of electrons, and it is not straightforward to construct antisymmetric quantum states on a quantum circuit. In this study, we provide a design principle for constructing variational quantum circuits to prepare an antisymmetric quantum state. The proposed circuit generates the superposition of exponentially many Slater determinants, that is, multiconfiguration state, which provides a systematic approach to approximating the exact ground state. We performed the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) to obtain the ground state of a one-dimensional hydrogen molecular system. As a result, the proposed circuit well reproduced the exact antisymmetric ground state and its energy, whereas the conventional variational circuit yielded neither the antisymmetric nor the symmetric state. Furthermore, we analyzed the many-body wave functions based on the quantum information theory, which illustrated the relation between the electron correlation and the quantum entanglement.