Boson Sampling Enhanced Quantum Chemistry

In this work, we give a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for solving electronic structure problems of molecules using only linear quantum optical systems. The variational ansatz we proposed is a hybrid of noninteracting boson dynamics and classical computational chemistry methods, specifically, the Hartree-Fock method and the configuration interaction method. The boson part is built by a linear optical interferometer, which is easier to realize compared with the well-known unitary coupled cluster (UCC) ansatz composed of quantum gates in conventional variational quantum eigensolver, and the classical part is merely classical processing acting on the Hamiltonian. The appearance of permanents in the boson part has its physical intuition to provide different kinds of resources from commonly used single, double, and higher excitations in classical methods and the UCC ansatz to explore chemical quantum states. Such resources can help enhance the accuracy of methods used in the classical parts. We give a scalable hybrid homodyne and photon-number measurement procedure for evaluating the energy value, which has intrinsic abilities to mitigate photon loss errors, and discuss the extra measurement cost induced by the no Pauli exclusion principle for bosons with its solutions. To demonstrate our proposal, we run numerical experiments on several molecules and obtain their potential energy curves reaching chemical accuracy.