O(N^3) Measurement Cost for Variational Quantum Eigensolver on Molecular Hamiltonians

Variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is a promising algorithm for near-term quantum machines. It can be used to estimate the ground state energy of a molecule by performing separate measurements of O(N 4 ) terms. This quartic scaling appears to be a significant obstacle to practical applications. However, we note that it empirically reduces to O(N 3 ) when we […]