Gapped and gapless phases of frustration-free spin-1/2 chains

We consider a family of translation-invariant quantum spin chains with nearest-neighbor interactions and derive necessary and sufficient conditions for these systems to be gapped in the thermodynamic limit. More precisely, let $\psi$ be an arbitrary two-qubit state. We consider a chain of $n$ qubits with open boundary conditions and Hamiltonian $H_n(\psi)$ which is defined as the sum of rank-1 projectors onto $\psi$ applied to consecutive pairs of qubits. We show that the spectral gap of $H_n(\psi)$ is upper bounded by $1/(n-1)$ if the eigenvalues of a certain two-by-two matrix simply related to $\psi$ have equal non-zero absolute value. Otherwise, the spectral gap is lower bounded by a positive constant independent of $n$ (depending only on $\psi$). A key ingredient in the proof is a new operator inequality for the ground space projector which expresses a monotonicity under the partial trace. This monotonicity property appears to be very general and might be interesting in its own right. As an extension of our main result, we obtain a complete classification of gapped and gapless phases of frustration-free translation-invariant spin-1/2 chains with nearest-neighbor interactions.Comment: v3: published versio

Exact synthesis of single-qubit unitaries over Clifford-cyclotomic gate sets

We generalize an efficient exact synthesis algorithm for single-qubit unitaries over the Clifford+T gate set which was presented by Kliuchnikov, Maslov and Mosca. Their algorithm takes as input an exactly synthesizable single-qubit unitary--one which can be expressed without error as a product of Clifford and T gates--and outputs a sequence of gates which implements it. The algorithm is optimal in the sense that the length of the sequence, measured by the number of T gates, is smallest possible. In this paper, for each positive even integer $n$ we consider the "Clifford-cyclotomic" gate set consisting of the Clifford group plus a z-rotation by $\frac{\pi}{n}$. We present an efficient exact synthesis algorithm which outputs a decomposition using the minimum number of $\frac{\pi}{n}$ z-rotations. For the Clifford+T case $n=4$ the group of exactly synthesizable unitaries was shown to be equal to the group of unitaries with entries over the ring $\mathbb{Z}[e^{i\frac{\pi}{n}},1/2]$. We prove that this characterization holds for a handful of other small values of $n$ but the fraction of positive even integers for which it fails to hold is 100%.Comment: v2: published versio

Universal adiabatic quantum computation via the space-time circuit-to-Hamiltonian construction

We show how to perform universal adiabatic quantum computation using a Hamiltonian which describes a set of particles with local interactions on a two-dimensional grid. A single parameter in the Hamiltonian is adiabatically changed as a function of time to simulate the quantum circuit. We bound the eigenvalue gap above the unique groundstate by mapping our model onto the ferromagnetic XXZ chain with kink boundary conditions; the gap of this spin chain was computed exactly by Koma and Nachtergaele using its $q$-deformed version of SU(2) symmetry. We also discuss a related time-independent Hamiltonian which was shown by Janzing to be capable of universal computation. We observe that in the limit of large system size, the time evolution is equivalent to the exactly solvable quantum walk on Young's lattice

Complexity of the XY antiferromagnet at fixed magnetization

We prove that approximating the ground energy of the antiferromagnetic XY model on a simple graph at fixed magnetization (given as part of the instance specification) is QMA-complete. To show this, we strengthen a previous result by establishing QMA-completeness for approximating the ground energy of the Bose-Hubbard model on simple graphs. Using a connection between the XY and Bose-Hubbard models that we exploited in previous work, this establishes QMA-completeness of the XY model

Correlation length versus gap in frustration-free systems

Hastings established exponential decay of correlations for ground states of gapped quantum many-body systems. A ground state of a (geometrically) local Hamiltonian with spectral gap ε has correlation length ξ upper bounded as ξ=O(1/ε). In general this bound cannot be improved. Here we study the scaling of the correlation length as a function of the spectral gap in frustration-free local Hamiltonians, and we prove a tight bound ξ=O(1/√ε) in this setting. This highlights a fundamental difference between frustration-free and frustrated systems near criticality. The result is obtained using an improved version of the combinatorial proof of correlation decay due to Aharonov, Arad, Vazirani, and Landau

A Compressed Classical Description of Quantum States

We show how to approximately represent a quantum state using the square root of the usual amount of classical memory. The classical representation of an n-qubit state psi consists of its inner products with O(sqrt{2^n}) stabilizer states. A quantum state initially specified by its 2^n entries in the computational basis can be compressed to this form in time O(2^n poly(n)), and, subsequently, the compressed description can be used to additively approximate the expectation value of an arbitrary observable. Our compression scheme directly gives a new protocol for the vector in subspace problem with randomized one-way communication complexity that matches (up to polylogarithmic factors) the optimal upper bound, due to Raz. We obtain an exponential improvement over Raz\u27s protocol in terms of computational efficiency