Abstract
By leveraging the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), the "quantum equation of motion" (qEOM) method established itself as a promising tool for quantum chemistry on near-term quantum computers and has been used extensively to estimate molecular excited states. Here, we explore a novel application of this method, employing it to compute thermal averages of quantum systems, specifically molecules like ethylene and butadiene. A drawback of qEOM is that it requires measuring the expectation values of a large number of observables on the ground state of the system, and the number of necessary measurements can become a bottleneck of the method. In this work, we focus on measurements through informationally complete positive operator-valued measures (IC-POVMs) to achieve a reduction in the measurement overheads by estimating different observables of interest through the measurement of a single set of POVMs. We show with numerical simulations that the qEOM combined with IC-POVM measurements ensures satisfactory accuracy in the reconstruction of the thermal state with a reasonable number of shots.