197 research outputs found
The Importance of the Spectral Gap in Estimating Ground-State Energies
The field of quantum Hamiltonian complexity lies at the intersection of quantum many-body physics and computational complexity theory, with deep implications to both fields. The main object of study is the Local Hamiltonian problem, which is concerned with estimating the ground-state energy of a local Hamiltonian and is complete for the class QMA, a quantum generalization of the class NP. A major challenge in the field is to understand the complexity of the Local Hamiltonian problem in more physically natural parameter regimes. One crucial parameter in understanding the ground space of any Hamiltonian in many-body physics is the spectral gap, which is the difference between the smallest two eigenvalues. Despite its importance in quantum many-body physics, the role played by the spectral gap in the complexity of the Local Hamiltonian problem is less well-understood. In this work, we make progress on this question by considering the precise regime, in which one estimates the ground-state energy to within inverse exponential precision. Computing ground-state energies precisely is a task that is important for quantum chemistry and quantum many-body physics.
In the setting of inverse-exponential precision (promise gap), there is a surprising result that the complexity of Local Hamiltonian is magnified from QMA to PSPACE, the class of problems solvable in polynomial space (but possibly exponential time). We clarify the reason behind this boost in complexity. Specifically, we show that the full complexity of the high precision case only comes about when the spectral gap is exponentially small. As a consequence of the proof techniques developed to show our results, we uncover important implications for the representability and circuit complexity of ground states of local Hamiltonians, the theory of uniqueness of quantum witnesses, and techniques for the amplification of quantum witnesses in the presence of postselection
Universal 2-local Hamiltonian Quantum Computing
We present a Hamiltonian quantum computation scheme universal for quantum
computation (BQP). Our Hamiltonian is a sum of a polynomial number (in the
number of gates L in the quantum circuit) of time-independent, constant-norm,
2-local qubit-qubit interaction terms. Furthermore, each qubit in the system
interacts only with a constant number of other qubits. The computer runs in
three steps - starts in a simple initial product-state, evolves it for time of
order L^2 (up to logarithmic factors) and wraps up with a two-qubit
measurement. Our model differs from the previous universal 2-local Hamiltonian
constructions in that it does not use perturbation gadgets, does not need large
energy penalties in the Hamiltonian and does not need to run slowly to ensure
adiabatic evolution.Comment: recomputed the necessary number of interactions, new geometric
layout, added reference
Perturbative Gadgets at Arbitrary Orders
Adiabatic quantum algorithms are often most easily formulated using many-body
interactions. However, experimentally available interactions are generally
two-body. In 2004, Kempe, Kitaev, and Regev introduced perturbative gadgets, by
which arbitrary three-body effective interactions can be obtained using
Hamiltonians consisting only of two-body interactions. These three-body
effective interactions arise from the third order in perturbation theory. Since
their introduction, perturbative gadgets have become a standard tool in the
theory of quantum computation. Here we construct generalized gadgets so that
one can directly obtain arbitrary k-body effective interactions from two-body
Hamiltonians. These effective interactions arise from the kth order in
perturbation theory.Comment: Corrected an error: U dagger vs. U invers
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