Operator commutativity screening and progressive operator block reordering toward many-body inspired quantum state preparation

Abstract

In the field of quantum chemistry, the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) has emerged as a highly promising approach to determine molecular energies and properties within the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. The central challenges of this approach lie in the design of an expressive Ansatz capable of representing the exact ground state wavefunction while concurrently being efficient to avoid numerical instabilities during the classical optimization. Owing to the constraints of current quantum hardware, the Ansatz must remain sufficiently compact while retaining the flexibility to capture essential correlation effects. To address these challenges, we propose a systematic dynamic Ansatz construction strategy in which the dominant operator blocks are initially identified through commutativity screening, combined with an energy sorting criterion. Subsequently, the Ansatz is progressively expanded in a stepwise manner via iterative operator block reordering. To minimize the overhead, the higher order correlation terms are incorporated via reduced lower-body tensor factorization in each operator block, while the adaptive construction strategy ensures that the optimization is guided along the optimal trajectory to mitigate potential numerical instabilities due to the presence of local traps. Benchmark applications to various molecular systems demonstrate that this strategy of progressive operator-block addition achieves accurate energetics with significantly fewer parameters while efficiently bypassing local traps. Moreover, in strongly correlated regions, such as bond dissociation, the method successfully reproduces the ground state, where other contemporary approaches often fail.