Capabilities and limits of the unitary coupled-cluster approach with generalized two-body cluster operators

Abstract

Unitary cluster expansions of the electronic wavefunction have recently gained much interest because of their use in conjunction with quantum algorithms. In this contribution, we investigate some aspects of an ansatz, using generalized two-body excitation operators, which have been considered in some recent studies on quantum algorithms for quantum chemistry. Our numerical results show that, in particular, two-body operators with effective particle–hole excitation level of one in connection with the usual particle–hole double excitation operators lead to a very accurate, yet compact representation of the wavefunction. Generalized two-body operators with effective excitation rank zero have a considerably less pronounced effect. We compare with standard and unitary coupled-cluster expansions and show that the above mentioned approach matches or even surpasses the accuracy of expansions with three-body particle–hole excitations, in particular at the onset of strong correlation. A downside of the approach is that it is rather difficult to rigorously converge it to its variational minimum.