The cascaded variational quantum eigensolver (CVQE) circumvents the need for iterative communication between the quantum and classical processing units that is necessary in the conventional VQE algorithm. While CVQE offers complete freedom to choose the guiding state as input, not all guiding states provide both accurate solutions and efficient resource usage. Our work presents a process based on trapezoidal-state preparation for selecting guiding states that yield accurate many-electron ground-state solutions with minimal resource consumption. By analyzing state probability distributions at different stages of CVQE calculations for the collision complex mediating the ${\mathrm{H}}_2+{\mathrm{H}}_2{}^{+}\to {\mathrm{H}}_3{}^{+}+\mathrm{H}$ bimolecular reaction, we identify stage-specific errors, trace their impact on final classical optimization, and determine the optimal guiding-state parameters for given resource constraints. Our findings uncover a critical trade-off on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, demonstrating that shallower diabatic circuits provide the best compromise among optimization efficiency, state quality, sampling cost, and signal-to-noise ratio in our system.

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• Quantum algorithms
• Quantum algorithms & computation
• Quantum simulation