Papers › Calculating potential energy surfaces with quantum computers by measuring only the...
Calculating potential energy surfaces with quantum computers by measuring only the density along adiabatic transitions
James Brown
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
We show that chemically-accurate potential energy surfaces (PESs) can be generated from quantum computers by measuring only the density along an adiabatic transition between different molecular geometries. In lieu of using phase estimation, the energy is evaluated by performing line-integration using the inverted real-space Time-Dependant Density Functional Theory Kohn-Sham potential obtained from the geometry-varying densities of the full wavefunction. The accuracy of this method depends on the validity of the adiabatic evolution itself and the potential inversion process (which is theoretically exact but can be numerically unstable), whereas total evolution time is the defining factor for the precision of phase estimation. We examine the method with a one-dimensional system of two electrons for both the ground and first triplet state in first quantization, as well as the ground state of three- and four- electron systems in second quantization. It is shown that few accurate measurements can be utilized to obtain chemical accuracy across the full potential energy curve, with shorter propagation time than may be required using phase estimation for a similar accuracy. We also show that an accurate potential energy curve can be calculated by making many imprecise density measurements (using few shots) along the time evolution and smoothing the resulting density evolution. Finally, it is important to note that the method is able to classically provide a check of its own accuracy by comparing the density resulting from a time-independent Kohn-Sham calculation using the inverted potential, with the measured density. This can be used to determine whether longer adiabatic evolution times are required to satisfy the adiabatic theorem.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections