Clifford-efficient sparse state preparation for molecular wavefunctions

Quantum Physics arXiv:2608.20593 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 20 Aug 2026] Title:Clifford-efficient sparse state preparation for molecular wavefunctions Authors:Yingrong Chen, Nathan A. Baker, Rushi Gong, Conrad S.N. Johnston, Brad Lackey, Hongbin Liu, Sasha Schmidt, Yuan Su, David B. Williams-Young, Yinuo Yang View a PDF of the paper titled Clifford-efficient sparse state preparation for molecular wavefunctions, by Yingrong Chen and 8 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Sparse quantum state preparation concerns an $n$-qubit target state that is a superposition of only $d \ll 2^n$ computational basis states. Existing approaches exploit this sparsity by compressing these $d$ basis states and their amplitudes onto a smaller set of qubits, called the dense register, before expanding the prepared state to the full register. Rather than relying on the permutation-based compression used in prior work, we exploit affine relationships among the binary configurations over the finite field $\operatorname{GF}(2)$ to reduce both the non-Clifford gate count and the ancillary qubit count. Invertible affine transformations over $\operatorname{GF}(2)$, comprising Gaussian elimination and all-ones-row removal, first reduce the dense register from $n$ to the rank $r$ using only Clifford gates and no ancillary qubits. An optional binary encoding stage then trades additional Toffoli gates and ancillary qubits for further compression to the minimum $\lceil\log_2 d\rceil$ dense qubits needed to represent $d$ distinct configurations. For chemically relevant wavefunctions, such as those obtained from selected configuration interaction calculations, shared electronic excitation patterns produce many of these affine relationships, enabling substantial Clifford-only compression before binary encoding. Across the molecular benchmarks, our method requires the fewest ancillary qubits among the evaluated sparse state preparation methods while maintaining comparable non-Clifford gate counts when using binary encoding. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2608.20593 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2608.20593v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.20593 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Yingrong Chen [view email] [v1] Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:13:45 UTC (2,282 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Clifford-efficient sparse state preparation for molecular wavefunctions, by Yingrong Chen and 8 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-08 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)