122 research outputs found
Complexity of commuting Hamiltonians on a square lattice of qubits
We consider the computational complexity of Hamiltonians which are sums of
commuting terms acting on plaquettes in a square lattice of qubits, and we show
that deciding whether the ground state minimizes the energy of each local term
individually is in the complexity class NP. That is, if the ground states has
this property, this can be proven using a classical certificate which can be
efficiently verified on a classical computer. Different to previous results on
commuting Hamiltonians, our certificate proves the existence of such a state
without giving instructions on how to prepare it.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures. v2: Minor corrections. Accepted version,
Journal-Ref adde
The computational complexity of density functional theory
Density functional theory is a successful branch of numerical simulations of
quantum systems. While the foundations are rigorously defined, the universal
functional must be approximated resulting in a `semi'-ab initio approach. The
search for improved functionals has resulted in hundreds of functionals and
remains an active research area. This chapter is concerned with understanding
fundamental limitations of any algorithmic approach to approximating the
universal functional. The results based on Hamiltonian complexity presented
here are largely based on \cite{Schuch09}. In this chapter, we explain the
computational complexity of DFT and any other approach to solving electronic
structure Hamiltonians. The proof relies on perturbative gadgets widely used in
Hamiltonian complexity and we provide an introduction to these techniques using
the Schrieffer-Wolff method. Since the difficulty of this problem has been well
appreciated before this formalization, practitioners have turned to a host
approximate Hamiltonians. By extending the results of \cite{Schuch09}, we show
in DFT, although the introduction of an approximate potential leads to a
non-interacting Hamiltonian, it remains, in the worst case, an NP-complete
problem.Comment: Contributed chapter to "Many-Electron Approaches in Physics,
Chemistry and Mathematics: A Multidisciplinary View
A new construction for a QMA complete 3-local Hamiltonian
We present a new way of encoding a quantum computation into a 3-local
Hamiltonian. Our construction is novel in that it does not include any terms
that induce legal-illegal clock transitions. Therefore, the weights of the
terms in the Hamiltonian do not scale with the size of the problem as in
previous constructions. This improves the construction by Kempe and Regev, who
were the first to prove that 3-local Hamiltonian is complete for the complexity
class QMA, the quantum analogue of NP.
Quantum k-SAT, a restricted version of the local Hamiltonian problem using
only projector terms, was introduced by Bravyi as an analogue of the classical
k-SAT problem. Bravyi proved that quantum 4-SAT is complete for the class QMA
with one-sided error (QMA_1) and that quantum 2-SAT is in P. We give an
encoding of a quantum circuit into a quantum 4-SAT Hamiltonian using only
3-local terms. As an intermediate step to this 3-local construction, we show
that quantum 3-SAT for particles with dimensions 3x2x2 (a qutrit and two
qubits) is QMA_1 complete. The complexity of quantum 3-SAT with qubits remains
an open question.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
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