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arXiv:1010.2480 · Physical Review A

Complete characterization of the ground-space structure of two-body frustration-free Hamiltonians for qubits

Zhengfeng Ji, Zhaohui Wei, Bei Zeng

Published Oct 27, 2011• 16 citations
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Abstract

The problem of finding the ground state of a frustration-free Hamiltonian carrying only two-body interactions between qubits is known to be solvable in polynomial time. It is also shown recently that, for any such Hamiltonian, there is always a ground state that is a product of single- or two-qubit states. However, it remains unclear whether the whole ground space is of any succinct structure. Here, we give a complete characterization of the ground space of any two-body frustration-free Hamiltonian of qubits. Namely, it is a span of tree tensor network states of the same tree structure. This characterization allows us to show that the problem of determining the ground-state degeneracy is as hard as, but no harder than, its classical analog.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.84.042338

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The problem of finding the ground state of a frustration-free Hamiltonian carrying only two-body interactions between qubits is known to be solvable in polynomial time. It is also shown recently that, for any such Hamiltonian, there is always a ground state that is a product of single- or two-qubit states. However, it remains unclear whether the whole ground space is of any succinct structure. Here, we give a complete characterization of the ground space of any two-body frustration-free Hamiltonian of qubits. Namely, it is a span of tree tensor network states of the same tree structure. This characterization allows us to show that the problem of determining the ground-state degeneracy is as hard as, but no harder than, its classical analog.
We study the ground-state space properties for frustration-free Hamiltonians. We introduce a concept of “reduced spaces” to characterize local structures of ground-state spaces. For a many-body system, we characterize mathematical structures for the set Θk of all the k-particle reduced spaces, which with a binary operation called join forms a semilattice that can be interpreted as an abstract convex structure. The smallest nonzero elements in Θk, called atoms, are analogs of extreme points. We study the properties of atoms in Θk and discuss its relationship with ground states of k-local frustration-free Hamiltonians. For spin-1/2 systems, we show that all the atoms in Θ2 are unique ground states of some 2-local frustration-free Hamiltonians. Moreover, we show that the elements in Θk may not be the join of atoms, indicating a richer structure for Θk beyond the convex structure. Our study of Θk deepens the understanding of ground-state space properties for frustration-free Hamiltonians, from the new perspective of reduced spaces.
The ground states of some many-body quantum systems can serve as resource states for the one-way quantum computing model, achieving the full power of quantum computation. Such resource states are found, for example, in spin-52\frac{5}{2}25​ and spin-32\frac{3}{2}23​ systems. It is, of course, desirable to have a natural resource state in a spin-12\frac{1}{2}21​, that is, qubit system. Here, we give a negative answer to this question for frustration-free systems with two-body interactions. In fact, it is shown to be impossible for any genuinely entangled qubit state to be a nondegenerate ground state of any two-body frustration-free Hamiltonian. What is more, we also prove that every spin-12\frac{1}{2}21​ frustration-free Hamiltonian with two-body interaction always has a ground state that is a product of single- or two-qubit states. In other words, there cannot be any interesting entanglement features in the ground state of such a qubit Hamiltonian.
The framework of measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC) allows us to view the ground states of local Hamiltonians as potential resources for universal quantum computation. A central goal in this field is to find models with ground states that are universal for MBQC and that are also natural in the sense that they involve only two-body interactions and have a small local Hilbert space dimension. Graph states are the original resource states for MBQC, and while it is not possible to obtain graph states as exact ground states of two-body Hamiltonians here we construct two-body frustration-free Hamiltonians that have arbitrarily good approximations of graph states as unique ground states. The construction involves taking a two-body frustration-free model that has a ground state convertible to a graph state with stochastic local operations, then deforming the model such that its ground state is close to a graph state. Each graph state qubit resides in a subspace of a higher dimensional particle. This deformation can be applied to two-body frustration-free Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki (AKLT) models, yielding Hamiltonians that are exactly solvable with exact tensor network expressions for ground states. For the star-lattice AKLT model, the ground state of which is not expected to be a universal resource for MBQC, applying such a deformation appears to enhance the computational power of the ground state, promoting it to a universal resource for MBQC. Transitions in computational power, similar to percolation phase transitions, can be observed when Hamiltonians are deformed in this way. Improving the fidelity of the ground state comes at the cost of a shrinking gap. While analytically proving gap properties for these types of models is difficult in general, we provide a detailed analysis of the deformation of a spin-1 AKLT state to a linear graph state.
We discuss a general scheme for the study of frustration in quantum systems. We introduce a universal measure of frustration for arbitrary quantum systems with Hamiltonians made of sums of local two-body contributions in terms of the overlap between the unfrustrated ground state of the pair Hamiltonians and the frustrated ground state of the total Hamiltonian. We derive an exact lower bound this overlap measure of frutration in degenerate ground states of quantum many-body systems. The bound results in the sum of two contributions: entanglement and classical correlations arising from local measurements. We show that average frustration properties are completely determined by the behavior of the maximally mixed ground state. We identify sufficient conditions for a quantum spin system to saturate the bound, and for models with twofold degeneracy we prove that average and local frustration coincide. If all the (pure) ground states of a given Hamiltonian saturate the inequality, then the system is said to be inequality saturating. These conditions provide a generalization to the quantum domain of the Toulouse criteria for classical frustration-free systems. The models satisfying these conditions can be reasonably identified as geometrically unfrustrated and subject to frustration of purely quantum origin. Our results therefore establish a unified framework for studying the intertwining of geometric and quantum contributions to frustration. The mathematical scheme can be put to test by relating the overlap measure and the inequalities it obeys to global and local observables in terms of the static structure factor and transverse n-point correlation functions.
We show that ground states of unfrustrated quantum spin-1/2 systems on general lattices satisfy an entanglement area law, provided that the Hamiltonian can be decomposed into nearest-neighbor interaction terms that have entangled excited states. The ground state manifold can be efficiently described as the image of a low-dimensional subspace of low Schmidt measure, under an efficiently contractible tree-tensor network. This structure gives rise to the possibility of efficiently simulating the complete ground space (which is in general degenerate). We briefly discuss 'non-generic' cases, including highly degenerate interactions with product eigenbases, using a relationship to percolation theory. We finally assess the possibility of using such tree tensor networks to simulate almost frustration-free spin models.
One of the central challenges in the study of quantum many-body systems is the complexity of simulating them on a classical computer. A recent advance (Landau et al. in Nat Phys, 2015) gave a polynomial time algorithm to compute a succinct classical description for unique ground states of gapped 1D quantum systems. Despite this progress many questions remained unsolved, including whether there exist efficient algorithms when the ground space is degenerate (and of polynomial dimension in the system size), or for the polynomially many lowest energy states, or even whether such states admit succinct classical descriptions or area laws. In this paper we give a new algorithm, based on a rigorously justified RG type transformation, for finding low energy states for 1D Hamiltonians acting on a chain of n particles. In the process we resolve some of the aforementioned open questions, including giving a polynomial time algorithm for poly(n) degenerate ground spaces and an n O(log n) algorithm for the poly(n) lowest energy states (under a mild density condition). For these classes of systems the existence of a succinct classical description and area laws were not rigorously proved before this work. The algorithms are natural and efficient, and for the case of finding unique ground states for frustration-free Hamiltonians the running time is O~(nM(n)){\tilde{O}(nM(n))}O~(nM(n)) , where M(n) is the time required to multiply two n × n matrices.