Solving Quantum Chemistry Problems with a D-Wave Quantum Annealer

Quantum annealing devices have been subject to various analyses in order to classify their usefulness for practical applications. While it has been successfully proven that such systems can in general be used for solving combinatorial optimization problems, they have not been used to solve chemistry applications. In this paper we apply a mapping, put forward by Xia et al. (The Journal of Physical Chemistry B 122.13 (2017): 3384-3395.), from a quantum chemistry Hamiltonian to an Ising spin glass formulation and find the ground state energy with a quantum annealer. Additionally we investigate the scaling in terms of needed physical qubits on a quantum annealer with limited connectivity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental study of quantum chemistry problems on quantum annealing devices. We find that current quantum annealing technologies result in an exponential scaling for such inherently quantum problems and that new couplers are necessary to make quantum annealers attractive for quantum chemistry.