Calculating ground and excited states is an exciting prospect for near-term quantum computing applications, and accurate and efficient algorithms are needed to assess viable directions. We develop an excited-state approach based on the contracted quantum eigensolver (ES-CQE), which iteratively attempts to find a solution to a contraction of the Schrödinger equation projected onto a subspace and does not require a priori information on the system. We focus on the anti-Hermitian portion of the equation, leading to a two-body unitary ansatz. We investigate the role of symmetries, initial states, constraints, and overall performance within the context of the model strongly correlated rectangular H system. We show that the ES-CQE achieves near-exact accuracy across the majority of states, covering regions of strong and weak electron correlation, while also elucidating challenging instances for two-body unitary ansatz.
