Glossary

QM/MM

Quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics. q2m3 treats a small QM region with PySCF and PennyLane while representing the solvent environment with classical point charges and MM force-field terms.

QPE

Quantum phase estimation. q2m3 uses QPE circuits to estimate molecular energies from a time-evolution phase.

EFTQC

Early fault-tolerant quantum computer. In q2m3, this term is used for resource-estimation studies such as logical qubit and Toffoli counts.

RDM

Reduced density matrix. The 1-RDM is used for Mulliken population analysis and quantum-to-classical observable transfer.

active space

The selected electrons and orbitals included in a quantum calculation. q2m3 documents active spaces as electrons/orbitals and the resulting system qubit count.

Trotterization

Approximation of Hamiltonian time evolution by decomposing it into products of simpler exponentials. Trotter depth affects QPE accuracy and Catalyst compile size.

delta_corr-pol

Correlation-polarization coupling: the change in electronic correlation energy caused by the MM environment.

Catalyst

The PennyLane compilation stack used for @qjit workflows. q2m3 uses it where compile-once/reuse-many execution is intended.

IR cache

A cache of Catalyst intermediate representation artifacts used to avoid repeating expensive compilation stages for unchanged circuit structure.

Hartree

Internal energy unit used by q2m3.

kcal/mol

Reporting unit used only after explicit conversion from Hartree.

Hamiltonian 1-norm

Sum-of-coefficients measure used by the EFTQC resource-estimation path.

MM embedding

Electrostatic coupling of classical point charges into the QM Hamiltonian.

phase wrapping

Ambiguity caused when the energy phase exceeds the finite QPE register range and wraps modulo one.