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Quantum computing is newly emerging information-processing technology which is foreseen to be exponentially faster than classical supercomputers. Current quantum processors are nevertheless very limited in their availability and performance and many important software tools for them do not exist yet. Therefore, various systems are studied by simulating the run of quantum computers. Building upon our previous experience with quantum computing of small molecular systems (see I. Miháliková et al., Molecules 27 (2022) 597, and I. Miháliková et al., Nanomaterials 2022, 12, 243), we have recently focused on computing electronic structure of periodic crystalline materials. Being inspired by the work of Cerasoli et al. (Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2020, 22, 21816), we have used hybrid variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm, which combined classical and quantum information processing. Employing tight-binding type of crystal description, we present our results for crystalline diamond-structure silicon. In particular, we focus on the states along the lowest occupied band within the electronic structure of Si and compare the results with values obtained by classical means. While we demonstrate an excellence agreement between classical and quantum-computed results in most of our calculations, we further critically check the sensitivity of our results with respect to computational set-up in our quantum-computing study. A few results were obtained also using quantum processors provided by the IBM.
Keywords: Quantum computing, crystals, tight-binding method, quantum-mechanical calculations© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.