Paper
Probing the Ground State of the Antiferromagnetic Heisenberg Model on the Kagome Lattice using Geometrically Informed Variational Quantum Eigensolver
Authors
Abdellah Tounsi, Nacer Eddine Belaloui, Abdelmouheymen Rabah Khamadja, Takei Eddine Fadi Lalaoui, Mohamed Messaoud Louamri, David E. Bernal Neira, Mohamed Taha Rouabah
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, our adaptive optimizer, I-AQNGD, achieves faster convergence -- in 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.