Finding the ground state of the Hubbard model by variational methods on a quantum computer with gate errors

A key goal of digital quantum computing is the simulation of fermionic systems such as molecules or the Hubbard model. Unfortunately, for present and near-future quantum computers the use of quantum error correction schemes is still out of reach. Hence, the finite error rate limits the use of quantum computers to algorithms with a low number of gates. The variational Hamiltonian ansatz (VHA) has been shown to produce the ground state in good approximation in a manageable number of steps. Here we study explicitly the effect of gate errors on its performance. The VHA is inspired by the adiabatic quantum evolution under the influence of a time-dependent Hamiltonian, where the -- ideally short -- fixed Trotter time steps are replaced by variational parameters. The method profits substantially from quantum variational error suppression, e.g., unitary quasi-static errors are mitigated within the algorithm. We test the performance of the VHA when applied to the Hubbard model in the presence of unitary control errors on quantum computers with realistic gate fidelities.