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arXiv:0807.2516 · Physical Review A

Adiabatic preparation without quantum phase transitions

Gernot Schaller

Published Sep 23, 2008• 28 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Many physically interesting models show a quantum phase transition when a single parameter is varied through a critical point, where the ground state and the first excited state become degenerate. When this parameter appears as a coupling constant, these models can be understood as straight-line interpolations between different Hamiltonians ${H}_{\mathrm{I}}$ and ${H}_{\mathrm{F}}$. For finite-size realizations however, there will usually be a finite energy gap between ground and first excited state. By slowly changing the coupling constant through the point with the minimum energy gap one thereby has an adiabatic algorithm that prepares the ground state of ${H}_{\mathrm{F}}$ from the ground state of ${H}_{\mathrm{I}}$. The adiabatic theorem implies that in order to obtain a good preparation fidelity the runtime $\ensuremath{\tau}$ should scale with the inverse energy gap and thereby also with the system size. In addition, for open quantum systems not only nonadiabatic but also thermal excitations are likely to occur. It is shown that---using only local Hamiltonians---for the one-dimensional quantum Ising model and the cluster model in a transverse field the conventional straight-line path can be replaced by a series of straight-line interpolations, along which the fundamental energy gap is always greater than a constant independent on the system size. The results are of interest for adiabatic quantum computation since strong similarities between adiabatic quantum algorithms and quantum phase transitions exist.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.78.032328

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Many physically interesting models show a quantum phase transition when a single parameter is varied through a critical point, where the ground state and the first excited state become degenerate. When this parameter appears as a coupling constant, these models can be understood as straight-line interpolations between different Hamiltonians HI{H}_{\mathrm{I}}HI​ and HF{H}_{\mathrm{F}}HF​. For finite-size realizations however, there will usually be a finite energy gap between ground and first excited state. By slowly changing the coupling constant through the point with the minimum energy gap one thereby has an adiabatic algorithm that prepares the ground state of HF{H}_{\mathrm{F}}HF​ from the ground state of HI{H}_{\mathrm{I}}HI​. The adiabatic theorem implies that in order to obtain a good preparation fidelity the runtime \ensuremathτ\ensuremath{\tau}\ensuremathτ should scale with the inverse energy gap and thereby also with the system size. In addition, for open quantum systems not only nonadiabatic but also thermal excitations are likely to occur. It is shown that---using only local Hamiltonians---for the one-dimensional quantum Ising model and the cluster model in a transverse field the conventional straight-line path can be replaced by a series of straight-line interpolations, along which the fundamental energy gap is always greater than a constant independent on the system size. The results are of interest for adiabatic quantum computation since strong similarities between adiabatic quantum algorithms and quantum phase transitions exist.
Ideally, in an adiabatic quantum computation or quantum state preparation, a simple ground state of an initial Hamiltonian is evolved adiabatically to an interesting ground state of a final Hamiltonian. Unfortunately, the simple and the interesting are often different enough to be separated by a quantum phase transition. Due to a vanishing energy gap between the ground state and excited states at the critical point, near the transition the adiabaticity is bound to fail. This failure is quantified by a quantum version of the Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM). In these notes I introduce KZM in its general textbook form, based on adiabatic/impulse approximation, and then support the picture by an exact solution of the integrable transverse field quantum Ising chain and an approximate one of the non-integrable Bose-Hubbard model. The last model illustrates typical problems with adiabatic quantum state preparation that are encoutered in atomic quantum simulators.
The quantum adiabatic theorem ensures that a slowly changing system, initially prepared in its ground state, will evolve to its final ground state with arbitrary precision. As a first result this thesis extends the original theorem to projection operators keeping the statement valid for Hamiltonians with degenerate ground spaces. Yet the main focus of this work lies in studying the efficiency of quantum circuit simulations by adabatic quantum computation. The standard Hamiltonian construction by Kitaev is based on a path graph reflecting the LLL computation steps and influencing the scaling of the necessary evolution time by its spectral gap of O(1L2)\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{L^2}\right)O(L21​). Aspiring to an improved running time we generalize Kitaev's Hamiltonian to so-called standard graph Hamiltonians based on graph families with a different spectral gap. In this generalized construction the first two time derivatives of the Hamiltonian and the fraction of initial vertices appear as additional parameters of running time. In a first step the time derivatives can be proven to be constant. Expansion results from spectral graph theory however impose a trade-off between the spectral gap and the fraction of initial vertices as well as the fraction of final vertices which corresponds to the probability for obtaining the correct computational output. Graphs with spectral gap O(1Lk)\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{L^k}\right)O(Lk1​), k<2k<2k<2, turn out to contradict very likely, graphs with k<1k<1k<1 even for sure at least one of the efficiency criterias for running time, output probability or Hamiltonian implementation. The above results may also be obstacles for a possible quantum PCP-theorem in complexity theory claiming the local Hamiltonian problem with constant gap to be QMA-complete since the very same Kitaev Hamiltonian is constructed in the QMA-hardness proof for the Local Hamiltonian problem.
We show that the rate of closing of the energy gap between the ground state and the first excited state, as a function of system size, behaves in many qualitatively different ways at first-order quantum phase transitions of the infinite-range quantum XY model. Examples include polynomial, exponential and even factorially fast closing of the energy gap, all of which coexist along a single axis of the phase diagram representing the transverse field. This variety emerges depending on whether or not the transverse field assumes a rational number as well as on how the series of system size is chosen toward the thermodynamic limit. We conclude that there is no generically applicable rule to relate the rate of gap closing and the order of quantum phase transitions as is often implied in many studies, in particular in relation to the computational complexity of quantum annealing in its implementation as quantum adiabatic computation.
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This Thesis focuses on different aspects of quantum computation theory: adiabatic quantum algorithms, decoherence during the adiabatic evolution and quantum simulators. After an overview on the area of quantum computation and setting up the formal ground for the rest of the Thesis we derive a general error estimate for adiabatic quantum computing. We demonstrate that the first-order correction, which has frequently been used as a condition for adiabatic quantum computation, does not yield a good estimate for the computational error. Therefore, a more general criterion is proposed, which includes higher-order corrections and shows that the computational error can be made exponentially small – which facilitates significantly shorter evolution times than the first-order estimate in certain situations. Based on this criterion and rather general arguments and assumptions, it can be demonstrated that a run-time of order of the inverse minimum energy gap is sufficient and necessary. Furthermore, exploiting the similarity between adiabatic quantum algorithms and quantum phase transitions, we study the impact of decoherence on the sweep through a second-order quantum phase transition for the prototypical example of the Ising chain in a transverse field and compare it to the adiabatic version of Grover’s search algorithm. It turns out that (in contrast to first-order transitions) the impact of decoherence caused by a weak coupling to a rather general environment increases with system size (i.e., number of spins/qubits), which might limit the scalability of the system. Finally, we propose the use of electron systems to construct laboratory systems based on present-day technology which reproduce and thereby simulate the quantum dynamics of the Ising model and the O(3) nonlinear sigma model.
We implement and characterize a numerical algorithm inspired by the sss source framework [B. Swingle and J. McGreevy, Phys. Rev. B 93, 045127 (2016)] for building a quantum many-body ground state wave function on a lattice of size 2L2L2L by applying adiabatic evolution to the corresponding ground state at size LLL, along with LLL interleaved ancillae. The procedure can in principle be iterated to repeatedly double the size of the system. We implement the algorithm for several one-dimensional (1D) spin model Hamiltonians, and find that the construction works particularly well when the gap is large and, interestingly, at scale-invariant critical points. We explain this feature as a natural consequence of the lattice expansion procedure. This behavior holds for both the integrable transverse-field Ising model and nonintegrable variations. We also develop an analytic perturbative understanding of the errors deep in either phase of the transverse-field Ising model, and suggest how the circuit could be modified to parametrically reduce errors. In addition to sharpening our perspective on entanglement renormalization in 1D, the algorithm could also potentially be used to build states experimentally, enabling the realization of certain long-range correlated states with low-depth quantum circuits.