Accurate Computation of Relativistic Excitation Energies Using Quantum Annealing

We report the first results for the computation of relativistic effects in quantum many-body systems using quantum annealers. An average accuracy of 98.9% in the fine structure splitting of boron-like ions with respect to experiments has been achieved using the Quantum Annealer Eigensolver (QAE) algorithm on the D-Wave Advantage hardware. We obtain these results in the framework of the many-electron Dirac theory. We implement QAE through our quantum annealing workflow that includes a novel qubit encoding scheme and a perturbation theory-based decomposition strategy.