The original variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) typically minimizes energy with hybrid quantum-classical optimization that aims to find the ground state. Here, we propose VQE based on minimizing energy variance and call it variance-VQE (VVQE), which treats the ground state and excited states on the same footing, since an arbitrary eigenstate for a Hamiltonian should have zero energy variance. We demonstrate the properties of VVQE for solving a set of excited states in quantum chemistry problems. Remarkably, we show that optimization of a combination of energy and variance may be more efficient to find low-energy excited states than those of minimizing energy or variance alone. We further reveal that the optimization can be boosted with stochastic gradient descent by Hamiltonian sampling, which uses only a few terms of the Hamiltonian and thus significantly reduces the quantum resource for evaluating variance and its gradients.

We study few-body problems in mixed dimensions where two or three heavy atoms are trapped individually in parallel one-dimensional tubes or two-dimensional disks and a single light atom travels freely in three dimensions. Using the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, we find three-and four-body bound states for a broad parameter region. Specifically, the existence of trimer and tetramer states persists to the negative scattering length regime, where no two-body bound state is present. As pointed out by Y. Nishida in an earlier work [Phys. Rev. A 82, 011605(R) (2010)], these few-body bound states are stable against three-body recombination due to geometric separation. In addition, we find that the binding energy of the ground trimer and tetramer state reaches its maximum value when the scattering lengths are comparable to the separation between the low-dimensional traps.

In this work we study the formation and dynamics of polarons in a system with a few impurities in a lattice immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). This system has been experimentally realized using ultracold atoms and optical lattices. Here we consider a two-band model for the impurity atoms, along with a Bogoliubov approximation for the BEC, with phonons coupled to impurities via both intra- and inter-band transitions. We decouple this Fr\"ohlich-like term by an extended two-band Lang-Firsov polaron transformation using a variational method. The new effective Hamiltonian with two (polaron) bands differs from the original Hamiltonian by modified coherent transport, polaron energy shifts and induced long-range interaction. A Lindblad master equation approach is used to take into account residual incoherent coupling between polaron and bath. This polaronic treatment yields a renormalized inter-band relaxation rate compared to Fermi's Golden Rule. For a strongly coupled two-band Fr\"ohlich Hamiltonian, the polaron is tightly dressed in each band and can not tunnel between them, leading to an inter-band self-trapping effect.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figure

Variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) optimizes parameterized eigenstates of a Hamiltonian on a quantum processor by updating parameters with a classical computer. Such a hybrid quantumclassical optimization serves as a practical way to leverage up classical algorithms to exploit the power of near-term quantum computing. Here, we develop a hybrid algorithm for VQE, emphasizing the classical side, that can solve a group of related Hamiltonians simultaneously. The algorithm incorporates a snake algorithm into many VQE tasks to collectively optimize variational parameters of different Hamiltonians. Such so-called collective VQEs (cVQEs) is applied for solving molecules with varied bond length, which is a standard problem in quantum chemistry. Numeral simulations show that cVQE is not only more efficient in convergence, but also trends to avoid single VQE task to be trapped in local minimums. The collective optimization utilizes intrinsic relations between related tasks and may inspire advanced hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for solving practical problems.

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