Catalytic Tomography of Ground States

Chi-Fang Chen, Robbie King (Dec 12 2025).

Abstract: We introduce a simple protocol for measuring properties of a gapped ground state with essentially no disturbance to the state. The required Hamiltonian evolution time scales inversely with the spectral gap and target precision (up to logarithmic factors), which is optimal. For local observables on geometrically local systems, the protocol only requires Hamiltonian evolution on a quasi-local patch of inverse-gap radius. Our results show that gapped ground states are algorithmically readable from a single copy without a recovery or rewinding procedure, which may drastically reduce tomography overhead in certain quantum simulation tasks.

Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10247