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The efficient calculation of Hamiltonian spectra, a problem often intractable on classical machines, can find application in many fields, from physics to chemistry. Here, we introduce the concept of an "eigenstate witness" and through it provide a new quantum approach which combines variational methods and phase estimation to approximate eigenvalues for both ground and excited states. This protocol is experimentally verified on a programmable silicon quantum photonic chip, a mass-manufacturable platform, which embeds entangled state generation, arbitrary controlled-unitary operations, and projective measurements. Both ground and excited states are experimentally found with fidelities >99%, and their eigenvalues are estimated with 32-bits of precision. We also investigate and discuss the scalability of the approach and study its performance through numerical simulations of more complex Hamiltonians. This result shows promising progress towards quantum chemistry on quantum computers., 9 pages, 4 figures, plus Supplementary Material [New version with minor typos corrected.]

By expressing the electronic wavefunction in an explicitly-correlated (Jastrow-factorised) form, a similarity-transformed effective Hamiltonian can be derived. The effective Hamiltonian is non-Hermitian and contains three-body interactions. The resulting ground-state eigenvalue problem can be solved projectively using a stochastic configuration-interaction formalism. Our approach permits use of highly flexible Jastrow functions, which we show to be effective in achieving extremely high accuracy, even with small basis sets. Results are presented for the total energies and ionisation potentials of the first-row atoms, achieving accuracy within a mH of the basis-set limit, using modest basis sets and computational effort., Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure