Quadratic Clifford expansion for efficient benchmarking and initialization of variational quantum algorithms

Variational quantum algorithms are considered to be appealing applications of near-term quantum computers. However, it has been unclear whether they can outperform classical algorithms or not. To reveal their limitations, we must seek a technique to benchmark them on large scale problems. Here, we propose a perturbative approach for efficient benchmarking of variational quantum algorithms. The proposed technique performs perturbative expansion of a circuit consisting of Clifford and Pauli rotation gates, which is enabled by exploiting the classical simulatability of Clifford circuits. Our method can be applied to a wide family of parameterized quantum circuits consisting of Clifford gates and single-qubit rotation gates. The approximate optimal parameter obtained by the method can also serve as an initial guess for further optimizations on a quantum device, which can potentially solve the so-called "barren-plateau" problem. As the first application of the method, we perform a benchmark of so-called hardware-efficient-type ansatzes when they are applied to the VQE of one-dimensional hydrogen chains up to H₂₄, which corresponds to 48-qubit system, using a standard workstation.