Quantum simulation of water-molecule bond angles using an NMR quantum computer

Determining the properties of molecules, such as bond angles and bond lengths, is an important part of materials science. Quantum simulators are expected to efficiently determine them by calculating their energy spectrum. Compared with the previous single-resonant quantum eigensolver adopted in simulating water molecule [Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 090504 (2019)], we propose a multiresonant quantum eigensolver that can search for the energy spectrum of molecules in a parallel manner. Our approach can exponentially save the cost of finding the energy spectrum by a factor of 2ʳ, where r is the number of ancillary qubits. As an interesting demonstration, we have designed and implemented an experiment to determine the bond angle of water molecules on a four-qubit nuclear spin quantum processor. We experimentally estimate the ground and first excitation energies and their corresponding states for effective water Hamiltonians with different H-O bond angles. The experimental results clearly show that the molecule structure with ∠H-O~100^∘ bond angle is most stable. We believe that our approach sheds light on further applications in solving quantum chemical problems.