Calculating Potential Energy Surfaces with Quantum Computers by Measuring Only the Density Along Adiabatic Transitions

We show that chemically-accurate potential energy surfaces (PESs) can be generated from quantum computers by measuring the density along an adiabatic transition between different molecular geometries. In lieu of using phase estimation, the energy is evaluated by performing line-integration using the inverted TDDFT Kohn-Sham potential obtained from the time-varying densities. The accuracy of this method depends on the validity of the adiabatic evolution itself and the potential inversion process (which is theoretically exact but can be numerically unstable), whereas total evolution time is the defining factor for the precision of phase estimation. We examine the method with a one-dimensional system of two electrons for both the ground and first triplet state in first quantization, as well as the ground state of three- and four- electron systems in second quantization. It is shown that few accurate measurements can be utilized to obtain chemical accuracy across the full potential energy curve, with shorter propagation time than may be required using phase estimation for a similar accuracy. We also show that an accurate potential energy curve can be calculated by making many imprecise density measurements (using few shots) along the time evolution and smoothing the resulting density evolution. We discuss how one can generate full PESs using either sparse grid representations or machine learning density functionals where it is known that training the functional using the density (along with the energy) generates a more transferable functional than only using the energy. Finally, it is important to note that the method is able to classically provide a check of its own accuracy by comparing the density resulting from a time-independent Kohn-Sham calculation using the inverted potential, with the measured density.