Sampling reduced density matrix to extract fine levels of entanglement spectrum

Low-lying entanglement spectrum provides the quintessential fingerprint to identify the highly entangled quantum matter with topological and conformal field-theoretical properties. However, when the entangling region acquires long boundary with the environment, such as that between long coupled chains or in two or higher dimensions, there unfortunately exists no universal yet practical method to compute the entanglement spectra with affordable computational cost. Here we propose a new scheme to overcome such difficulty and successfully extract the low-lying fine entanglement spectrum (ES). We trace out the environment via quantum Monte Carlo simulation and diagonalize the reduced density matrix to gain the ES. We demonstrate the strength and reliability of our method through long coupled spin chains and answer its long-standing controversy. Our simulation results, with unprecedentedly large system sizes, establish the practical computation scheme of the entanglement spectrum with a huge freedom degree of environment

Quantum imaginary time evolution and quantum annealing meet topological sector optimization

Optimization problems are the core challenge in many fields of science and engineering, yet general and effective methods are scarce for searching optimal solutions. Quantum computing has been envisioned to help solve such problems, for example, the quantum annealing (QA) method based on adiabatic evolution has been extensively explored and successfully implemented on quantum simulators such as D-wave's annealers and some Rydberg arrays. In this work, we investigate topological sector optimization (TSO) problem, which attracts particular interests in the quantum many-body physics community. We reveal that the topology induced by frustration in the spin model is an intrinsic obstruction for QA and other traditional methods to approach the ground state. We demonstrate that the optimization difficulties of TSO problem are not restricted to the gaplessness, but are also due to the topological nature which are often ignored for the analysis of optimization problems before. To solve TSO problems, we utilize quantum imaginary time evolution (QITE) with a possible realization on quantum computers, which exploits the property of quantum superposition to explore the full Hilbert space and can thus address optimization problems of topological nature. We report the performance of different quantum optimization algorithms on TSO problems and demonstrate that their capability to address optimization problems are distinct even when considering the quantum computational resources required for practical QITE implementations