Probability distribution analysis of the cascaded variational quantum eigensolver
Abstract
The cascaded variational quantum eigensolver (CVQE) circumvents the need for iterative communication between the quantum and classical processing units that is necessary in the conventional VQE algorithm. While CVQE offers complete freedom to choose the guiding state as input, not all guiding states provide both accurate solutions and efficient resource usage. Our work presents a process based on trapezoidal-state preparation for selecting guiding states that yield accurate many-electron ground-state solutions with minimal resource consumption. By analyzing state probability distributions at different stages of CVQE calculations for the collision complex mediating the H2 + H2+ → H3+ + H bimolecular reaction, we identify stage-specific errors, trace their impact on final classical optimization, and determine the optimal guiding-state parameters for given resource constraints. Our findings uncover a critical trade-off on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, demonstrating that shallower diabatic circuits provide the best compromise among optimization efficiency, state quality, sampling cost, and signal-to-noise ratio in our system.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{lai2026probability,
title = {{Probability distribution analysis of the cascaded variational quantum eigensolver}},
author = {Yi-Hua Lai and John P. T. Stenger and Gloria Bazargan and Igor V. Schweigert and Daniel Gunlycke},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.00807},
eprint = {2605.00807},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00807},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Probability distribution analysis of the cascaded variational quantum eigensolver
AU - Yi-Hua Lai
AU - John P. T. Stenger
AU - Gloria Bazargan
AU - Igor V. Schweigert
AU - Daniel Gunlycke
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/16
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.00807
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00807
AB - The cascaded variational quantum eigensolver (CVQE) circumvents the need for iterative communication between the quantum and classical processing units that is necessary in the conventional VQE algorithm. While CVQE offers complete freedom to choose the guiding state as input, not all guiding states provide both accurate solutions and efficient resource usage. Our work presents a process based on trapezoidal-state preparation for selecting guiding states that yield accurate many-electron ground-state solutions with minimal resource consumption. By analyzing state probability distributions at different stages of CVQE calculations for the collision complex mediating the H_2 + H_2^+ → H_3^+ + H bimolecular reaction, we identify stage-specific errors, trace their impact on final classical optimization, and determine the optimal guiding-state parameters for given resource constraints. Our findings uncover a critical trade-off on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, demonstrating that shallower diabatic circuits provide the best compromise among optimization efficiency, state quality, sampling cost, and signal-to-noise ratio in our system.
ER -