Probing the Ground State of the Antiferromagnetic Heisenberg Model on the Kagome Lattice using Geometrically Informed Variational Quantum Eigensolver

Abstract

This work investigates the nature of the ground state of the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model on fundamental kagome cells, a triangle and a star, using the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm on real quantum hardware. We demonstrate that the ground state preparation is achievable using a shallow hardware-efficient quantum circuit with a naturally Euclidean parameter space. Our custom ansatz is capable of accurately recovering meaningful properties of the ground state such as the spin-spin correlation terms and static structure factor without explicit error mitigation. These features are found to be resilient to noise. We exploited the Fubini-Study metric in constructing the ansatz, ensuring a singularity-free parameter space. With this ansatz design, the adaptive gradient descent optimizer achieves a faster convergence in terms of the number of iterations compared to simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA). We further apply error mitigation techniques, including zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE) and qubit-wise readout error mitigation (REM). While ZNE does not obey the Rayleigh-Ritz variational principle, the conditions under which REM preserves it are discussed.