Bridging physical intuition and hardware efficiency for correlated electronic states: the local unitary cluster Jastrow ansatz for electronic structure

A prominent goal in quantum chemistry is to solve the molecular electronic structure problem for the ground state energy with high accuracy. While classical quantum chemistry is a relatively mature field, the accurate and scalable prediction of strongly correlated states found, e.g., in bond breaking and polynuclear transition metal compounds remains an open problem. Within the context of a variational quantum eigensolver, we propose a new family of ansatzes which provides a more physically appropriate description of strongly correlated electrons than unitary coupled cluster with singles and doubles excitations, with vastly reduced quantum resource requirements. Specifically, we present a set of local approximations to the unitary cluster Jastrow wavefunction motivated by Hubbard physics. The resulting ansatz removes the need for SWAP gates and can be tailored to arbitrary qubit topologies (e.g., square, hex, heavy-hex). Our ansatz is well-suited to take advantage of continuous sets of quantum gates recently realized on superconducting devices with tunable couplers, while retaining a unique level of physical transparency and interpretability. As the capabilities of quantum computing devices continue to progress, we expect that the local cluster Jastrow ansatz to be a natural choice to encode both statically and dynamically correlated electronic wavefunctions.