The Quantum Flow (QFlow) algorithm provides a resource-efficient framework for describing correlated many-body systems on hybrid quantum-classical architectures. By enabling parallel utilization of quantum and classical resources, QFlow offers a scalable pathway toward simulations of realistic systems. In this Letter, we report a high-performance computing (HPC) implementation of the QFlow formalism based on a singles-and-doubles model. We demonstrate its performance for target spaces comprising 82 and 114 orbitals, where the flow includes all 6 active electrons in 6 active orbitals type active spaces. In the largest QFlow simulations, we optimize 1.17 million wave function parameters using the equivalent of 12 qubits. Despite the modest qubit requirements of the underlying active-space problems, the method recovers over 95% of the total correlation energy obtained with the coupled cluster singles and doubles (CCSD) approach for systems dominated by dynamical correlation effects, which remain challenging for existing quantum algorithms. We further show that the QFlow formalism retains high accuracy in extended basis sets with diffuse functions, highlighting its potential for realistic large-scale quantum chemistry simulations.

Strong coupling to the vacuum electromagnetic field of optical cavities has been proposed as a route to control ground-state chemical reactivity, enabling “photonic substituent effects.” Recent theoretical work predicted that cavity coupling can invert intrinsic regioselectivity in electrophilic aromatic substitution in nitrobenzene. Here, we revisit this prediction using correlated ab initio cavity quantum electrodynamics. QED-CCSD calculations reveal substantially enhanced energetic reordering of Wheland intermediates relative to previous approaches, indicating that regioselective control may be achievable under more experimentally feasible cavity-coupling strengths than previously predicted. QED-DMRG analysis shows that this effect arises from cavity-induced reweighting of resonance structures, reinforcing the idea of a photonic substituent effect that is similarly influential on molecular electronic structure as chemical substituents. Complementary ab initio molecular dynamics simulations driven by QED-DFT analytic gradients demonstrate that orientational fluctuations introduce a competing dynamical constraint on selectivity, suggesting conditions where canonical 100% meta selectivity could be modified to give mixtures of ortho and meta or para and meta electrophilic aromatic substitution products.

In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework that extends single-reference (SR) coupled-cluster (CC) theory beyond its conventional role of describing a single electronic state-typically the lowest-energy state within the symmetry sector defined by the reference determinant. Rather than viewing the SR-CC cluster operator solely as a device for reproducing one target state, we consider more general constructions in which different components of the cluster operator play distinct roles, ranging from encoding states of different symmetry than the reference to enabling the SR-CC ansatz to describe multiple states simultaneously. These developments lead to a new class of SR-CC downfolding formalisms in which the resulting active-space effective Hamiltonians are capable of concurrently representing multiple correlated states non-orthogonal to the reference function. We establish three theorems that formalize this extension and demonstrate that standard CC downfolding emerges as a special case of the proposed framework. Finally, we introduce a Hermitian variant based on a unitary CC representation, which enables realistic simulations of ground and excited states while reducing the quantum resources required.

Quantum simulations of correlated many-body systems will inevitably operate with imperfect information: the prepared states may arise from incomplete or approximate ansatze, while their measured Hamiltonian and overlap matrix elements are additionally affected by hardware and statistical noise. Robust quantum algorithms will be those that can improve upon reliable lower-level descriptions in spite of these imperfections. We introduce a dual-space nonorthogonal configuration-interaction (DS-NOCI) framework built around this principle. Rather than replacing a classically accessible NOCI reference manifold with correlated quantum states, DS-NOCI retains both spaces and couples them variationally. The reference sector provides a stable many-body backbone, while the quantum states contribute whatever additional correlation directions they contain. With exact matrix elements, the enlarged dual space gives a ground-state energy no higher than either the reference-only NOCI or correlated-only quantum-NOCI spaces, ensuring that an incomplete correlation model cannot degrade the underlying variational description. The additional reference–correlated matrix elements require only one correlated state preparation and are therefore less demanding than the correlated–correlated block already required by quantum variant of NOCI. Molecular benchmarks further show enhanced resilience to imperfect amplitudes and noisy matrix elements. DS-NOCI thus provides a general strategy for building quantum many-body formulations that remain useful when both correlation models and quantum computations are necessarily incomplete and noisy.

We assess the performance of the Quantum Flow (QFlow) algorithm employing cost-effective solvers based on the unitary coupled-cluster ansatz with single and double excitations (QFlow-SD). The resulting energies are benchmarked against those obtained with an analogous QFlow formulation defined in the same active spaces but augmented by higher-rank excitations, including triples and quadruples (QFlow-SDTQ). Across all molecular systems considered, QFlow-SD exhibits close agreement with results from the canonical unitary coupled cluster with singles and doubles framework, while requiring substantially fewer qubits than the latter. For the water molecule in the cc-pVTZ basis, we further demonstrate the performance of a composite two-step downfolding strategy. In this approach, an initial coupled-cluster downfolding based on the double unitary coupled-cluster ansatz is followed by a QFlow treatment within the resulting target space, illustrating the effectiveness of combining classical downfolding with quantum flow optimization.

The practical application of quantum technologies to chemical problems faces significant challenges, particularly in the treatment of realistic basis sets and the accurate inclusion of electron correlation effects. A direct approach to these problems is currently infeasible due to limitations in the number of logical qubits, their fidelity, and the shallow circuit depths supported by existing hardware, all of which hinder simulations at the required level of accuracy. A promising alternative is hybrid quantum-classical computing, where classical resources are used to construct effective Hamiltonians characterized by dimensions that conform to the constraints of current quantum devices. In this paper, we demonstrate the performance of a hybrid approach: coupled cluster downfolded Hamiltonians are first evaluated in reduced-dimensionality active spaces, and the corresponding ground-state energies are subsequently computed using quantum algorithms. Our comprehensive analysis explores the achievable accuracy in recovering correlation energies when hundreds of orbitals are downfolded into a problem size tractable by today’s quantum hardware. We argue that such flexible hybrid algorithms, where problem size can be tailored to available quantum resources, can serve as a bridge between noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices and future fault-tolerant quantum computers, marking a step toward the early realization of quantum advantage in chemistry.

In this paper, we present a physically informed neural network (NN) representation of the effective interactions associated with coupled-cluster downfolding models to describe chemical systems and processes. The NN representation not only allows us to evaluate the effective interactions efficiently for various geometrical configurations of chemical systems corresponding to various levels of complexity of the underlying wave functions, but also reveals that the bare and effective interactions are related by a tangent function of some latent variables. We refer to this characterization of the effective interaction as a tangent model. We discuss the connection between this tangent model for the effective interaction with the previously developed theoretical analysis that examines the difference between the bare and effective Hamiltonians in the corresponding active spaces.

Coupled-cluster theory (CC) is a highly accurate and versatile method for simulating complex interactions within quantum systems. The extension of CC theory to model mixed electron-photon processes with quantum electrodynamics (QED) has improved our capability to predict cavity-modified chemistry, a field where photons are used as cost-effective and eco-friendly alternatives to catalyze/inhibit chemical reactions. However, calculations with CC methods, even without incorporating QED effects, are often prohibitively expensive. Simulations of larger systems require scalable infrastructures that exist for traditional CC methods but not for QED-CC methods. As such, we present a GPU-enabled, high-performance, open-source implementation of the quantum electrodynamics coupled-cluster method with single and double excitations (QED-CCSD) within the ExaChem quantum chemistry software package. ExaChem relies on the Tensor Algebra for Many-body Methods (TAMM) infrastructure: a parallel heterogeneous tensor library designed to achieve scalable performance on modern heterogeneous supercomputing platforms. We discuss theoretical foundations, algorithmic details, and numerical benchmarks to showcase the larger systems that ExaChem can simulate and how the integration of photonic degrees-of-freedom alters their ground-state properties.

In this work, we combine the recently developed double unitary coupled cluster (DUCC) theory with the adaptive, problem-tailored variational quantum eigensolver (ADAPT-VQE) to explore the accuracy of unitary downfolded Hamiltonians for quantum simulation of chemistry. We benchmark the ability of DUCC effective Hamiltonians to recover dynamical correlation energy outside of an active space. We consider the effects of strong correlation, commutator truncation, higher-body terms, and approximate external amplitudes on the accuracy of these effective Hamiltonians. When combining these DUCC Hamiltonians with ADAPT-VQE, we observe similar convergence of the ground state as compared with bare active space Hamiltonians, demonstrating that DUCC Hamiltonians provide increased accuracy without increasing the load on the quantum processor.

We present our successful implementation of the quantum electrodynamics coupled-cluster method with single and double excitations (QED-CCSD) for electronic and bosonic amplitudes, covering both individual and mixed excitation processes within the ExaChem program package, which relies on the Tensor Algebra for Many-body Methods (TAMM) infrastructure. TAMM is a parallel heterogeneous tensor library designed for utilizing modern computing platforms, from laptops to leadership-class computing resources. This developed computational framework extends the traditional CCSD method to incorporate the intricate interplay between electronic and bosonic degrees of freedom, providing a comprehensive description of quantum phenomena. We discuss theoretical foundations, algorithmic details, and numerical benchmarks to demonstrate how the integration of bosonic degrees of freedom alters the electronic ground state. The interactions between electrons and photons within an optical cavity are modeled using the Pauli-Fierz Hamiltonian within the dipole approximation in the length gauge. The integration of QED effects within the CCSD framework contributes to a more accurate and versatile model for simulating complex quantum systems, thereby opening avenues for a better understanding, prediction, and manipulation of various physical phenomena.

Accurately describing properties of challenging problems in physical sciences often requires complex mathematical models that are unmanageable to tackle head on. Therefore, developing reduced-dimensionality representations that encapsulate complex correlation effects in many-body systems is crucial to advance the understanding of these complicated problems. However, a numerical evaluation of these predictive models can still be associated with a significant computational overhead. To address this challenge, in this paper we discuss a combined framework that integrates recent advances in the development of active-space representations of coupled cluster (CC) downfolded Hamiltonians with neural network approaches. The primary objective of this effort is to train neural networks to eliminate the computationally expensive steps required for evaluating hundreds or thousands of Hugenholtz diagrams, which correspond to multidimensional tensor contractions necessary for evaluating a many-body form of downfolded effective Hamiltonians. Using small molecular systems (the H2O and HF molecules) as examples, we demonstrate that training neural networks employing effective Hamiltonians for a few nuclear geometries of molecules can accurately interpolate or extrapolate their forms to other geometrical configurations characterized by different intensities of correlation effects. We also discuss differences between effective interactions that define CC downfolded Hamiltonians with those of bare Hamiltonians defined by Coulomb interactions in the active spaces.

The transformative impact of modern computational paradigms and technologies, such as high-performance computing (HPC), quantum computing, and cloud computing, has opened up profound new opportunities for scientific simulations. Scalable computational chemistry is one beneficiary of this technological progress. The main focus of this paper is on the performance of various quantum chemical formulations, ranging from low-order methods to high-accuracy approaches, implemented in different computational chemistry packages and libraries, such as NWChem, NWChemEx, Scalable Predictive Methods for Excitations and Correlated Phenomena, ExaChem, and Fermi-Löwdin orbital self-interaction correction on Azure Quantum Elements, Microsoft's cloud services platform for scientific discovery. We pay particular attention to the intricate workflows for performing complex chemistry simulations, associated data curation, and mechanisms for accuracy assessment, which is demonstrated with the Arrows automated workflow for high throughput simulations. Finally, we provide a perspective on the role of cloud computing in supporting the mission of leadership computational facilities.

This paper evaluates the accuracy of the Hermitian form of the downfolding procedure using the double unitary coupled cluster (DUCC) ansatz on the benchmark systems of linear chains of hydrogen atoms, H6 and H8. The computational infrastructure employs the occupation-number-representation codes to construct the matrix representation of arbitrary second-quantized operators, allowing for the exact representation of exponentials of various operators. The tests demonstrate that external amplitudes from standard single-reference coupled cluster methods that sufficiently describe external (out-of-active-space) correlations reliably parameterize the Hermitian downfolded effective Hamiltonians in the DUCC formalism. The results show that this approach can overcome the problems associated with losing the variational character of corresponding energies in the corresponding SR-CC theories.

Polariton chemistry has attracted great attention as a potential route to modify chemical structure, properties, and reactivity through strong interactions between molecular electronic, vibrational, or rovibrational degrees of freedom. A rigorous theoretical treatment of molecular polaritons requires the treatment of matter and photon degrees of freedom on equal quantum mechanical footing. In the limit of molecular electronic strong or ultrastrong coupling to one or a few molecules, it is desirable to treat the molecular electronic degrees of freedom using the tools of ab initio quantum chemistry, yielding an approach we refer to as ab initio cavity quantum electrodynamics, where the photon degrees of freedom are treated at the level of cavity quantum electrodynamics. Here, we present an approach called Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics Complete Active Space Configuration Interaction theory to provide ground- and excited-state polaritonic surfaces with a balanced description of strong correlation effects among electronic and photonic degrees of freedom. This method provides a platform for ab initio cavity quantum electrodynamics when both strong electron correlation and strong light-matter coupling are important, and is an important step towards computational approaches that yield multiple polaritonic potential energy surfaces and couplings that can be leveraged for {ab initio molecular dynamics simulations of polariton chemistry.

Theoretical descriptions of excited states of molecular systems in high-energy regimes are crucial for supporting and driving many experimental efforts at light source facilities. However, capturing their complicated correlation effects requires formalisms that provide a hierarchical infrastructure of approximations. These approximations lead to an increased overhead in classical computing methods, and therefore, decisions regarding the ranking of approximations and the quality of results must be made on purely numerical grounds. The emergence of quantum computing methods has the potential to change this situation. In this study, we demonstrate the efficiency of Quantum Phase Estimator (QPE) in identifying core-level states relevant to x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. We compare and validate the QPE predictions with exact diagonalization and real-time equation-of-motion coupled cluster formulations, which are some of the most accurate methods for states dominated by collective correlation effects.

Downfolding coupled cluster (CC) techniques are powerful tools for reducing the dimensionality of many-body quantum problems. This work investigates how ground-state downfolding formalisms can target excited states using non-Aufbau reference determinants, paving the way for applications of quantum computing in excited-state chemistry. This study focuses on doubly excited states for which canonical equation-of-motion CC approaches struggle to describe unless one includes higher-than-double excitations. The downfolding technique results in state-specific effective Hamiltonians that, when diagonalized in their respective active spaces, provide ground- and excited-state total energies (and therefore excitation energies) comparable to high-level CC methods. The performance of this procedure is examined with doubly excited states of H$_{2}$, Methylene, Formaldehyde, and Nitroxyl.

In this paper, we evaluate the accuracy of the Hermitian form of the downfolding procedure utilizing the double unitary coupled cluster Ansatz (DUCC) on the H6 and H8 benchmark systems. The computational infrastructure employs the occupation-number-representation codes to construct the matrix representation of arbitrary second-quantized operators, enabling the exact representation of exponentials of various operators. The tests utilize external excitations estimated from standard single-reference coupled cluster methods (SR-CC) to demonstrate that higher-rank SR-CC external amplitudes were necessary to describe the energies in the strongly correlated regime adequately. We show that this approach can offset problems of the corresponding SR-CC theories associated with losing the variational character of corresponding energies.

We present an extension of many-body downfolding methods to reduce the resources required in the quantum phase estimation (QPE) algorithm. In this paper, we focus on the Schrieffer–Wolff (SW) transformation of the electronic Hamiltonians for molecular systems that provides significant simplifications of quantum circuits for simulations of quantum dynamics. We demonstrate that by employing Fock-space variants of the SW transformation (or rank-reducing similarity transformations (RRST)) one can significantly increase the locality of the qubit-mapped similarity-transformed Hamiltonians. The practical utilization of the SW-RRST formalism is associated with a series of approximations discussed in the manuscript. In particular, amplitudes that define RRST can be evaluated using conventional computers and then encoded on quantum computers. The SW-RRST QPE quantum algorithms can also be viewed as an extension of the standard state-specific coupled-cluster downfolding methods to provide a robust alternative to the traditional QPE algorithms to identify the ground and excited states for systems with various numbers of electrons using the same Fock-space representations of the downfolded Hamiltonian. The RRST formalism serves as a design principle for developing new classes of approximate schemes that reduce the complexity of quantum circuits.

Tensor algebra operations such as contractions in computational chemistry consume a significant fraction of the computing time on large-scale computing platforms. The widespread use of tensor contractions between large multi-dimensional tensors in describing electronic structure theory has motivated the development of multiple tensor algebra frameworks targeting heterogeneous computing platforms. In this paper, we present Tensor Algebra for Many-body Methods (TAMM), a framework for productive and performance-portable development of scalable computational chemistry methods. TAMM decouples the specification of the computation from the execution of these operations on available high-performance computing systems. With this design choice, the scientific application developers (domain scientists) can focus on the algorithmic requirements using the tensor algebra interface provided by TAMM, whereas high-performance computing developers can direct their attention to various optimizations on the underlying constructs, such as efficient data distribution, optimized scheduling algorithms, and efficient use of intra-node resources (e.g., graphics processing units). The modular structure of TAMM allows it to support different hardware architectures and incorporate new algorithmic advances. We describe the TAMM framework and our approach to the sustainable development of scalable ground- and excited-state electronic structure methods. We present case studies highlighting the ease of use, including the performance and productivity gains compared to other frameworks.

In this manuscript, we provide an overview of the recent developments of the coupled cluster (CC) downfolding methods, where the ground-state problem of a quantum system is represented through effective/downfolded Hamiltonians defined using active spaces. All CC downfolding techniques discussed here are derived from a single-reference exponential ansatz for the ground-state problem. We discuss several extensions of the non-Hermitian and Hermitian downfolding approaches to the time domain and the so-called quantum flows. We emphasize the important role of downfolding formalisms in transitioning chemical applications from noisy quantum devices to scalable and error-corrected quantum computers.