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arXiv:1410.0703

On complexity of the quantum Ising model

Sergey B. Bravyi, Matthew B. Hastings

Published Oct 2, 2014• 8 citations
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Abstract

We study complexity of several problems related to the Transverse field Ising Model (TIM). First, we consider the problem of estimating the ground state energy known as the Local Hamiltonian Problem (LHP). It is shown that the LHP for TIM on degree-3 graphs is equivalent modulo polynomial reductions to the LHP for general k-local `stoquastic' Hamiltonians with any constant $k\ge 2$. This result implies that estimating the ground state energy of TIM on degree-3 graphs is a complete problem for the complexity class StoqMA - an extension of the classical class MA. As a corollary, we complete the complexity classification of 2-local Hamiltonians with a fixed set of interactions proposed recently by Cubitt and Montanaro. Secondly, we study quantum annealing algorithms for finding ground states of classical spin Hamiltonians associated with hard optimization problems. We prove that the quantum annealing with TIM Hamiltonians is equivalent modulo polynomial reductions to the quantum annealing with a certain subclass of k-local stoquastic Hamiltonians. This subclass includes all Hamiltonians representable as a sum of a k-local diagonal Hamiltonian and a 2-local stoquastic Hamiltonian.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.1410.0703

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We study complexity of several problems related to the Transverse field Ising Model (TIM). First, we consider the problem of estimating the ground state energy known as the Local Hamiltonian Problem (LHP). It is shown that the LHP for TIM on degree-3 graphs is equivalent modulo polynomial reductions to the LHP for general k-local `stoquastic' Hamiltonians with any constant k≥2k\ge 2k≥2. This result implies that estimating the ground state energy of TIM on degree-3 graphs is a complete problem for the complexity class StoqMA - an extension of the classical class MA. As a corollary, we complete the complexity classification of 2-local Hamiltonians with a fixed set of interactions proposed recently by Cubitt and Montanaro. Secondly, we study quantum annealing algorithms for finding ground states of classical spin Hamiltonians associated with hard optimization problems. We prove that the quantum annealing with TIM Hamiltonians is equivalent modulo polynomial reductions to the quantum annealing with a certain subclass of k-local stoquastic Hamiltonians. This subclass includes all Hamiltonians representable as a sum of a k-local diagonal Hamiltonian and a 2-local stoquastic Hamiltonian.
The calculation of ground-state energies of physical systems can be formalised as the k-local Hamiltonian problem, which is the natural quantum analogue of classical constraint satisfaction problems. One way of making the problem more physically meaningful is to restrict the Hamiltonian in question by picking its terms from a fixed set S. Examples of such special cases are the Heisenberg and Ising models from condensed-matter physics. In this work we characterise the complexity of this problem for all 2-local qubit Hamiltonians. Depending on the subset S, the problem falls into one of the following categories: in P; NP-complete; polynomial-time equivalent to the Ising model with transverse magnetic fields; or QMA-complete. The third of these classes has been shown to be StoqMA-complete by Bravyi and Hastings. The characterisation holds even if S does not contain any 1-local terms; for example, we prove for the first time QMA-completeness of the Heisenberg and XY interactions in this setting. If S is assumed to contain all 1-local terms, which is the setting considered by previous work, we have a characterisation that goes beyond 2-local interactions: for any constant k, all k-local qubit Hamiltonians whose terms are picked from a fixed set S correspond to problems either in P; polynomial-time equivalent to the Ising model with transverse magnetic fields; or QMA-complete. These results are a quantum analogue of Schaefer's dichotomy theorem for boolean constraint satisfaction problems.
The calculation of ground-state energies of physical systems can be formalised as the k-local Hamiltonian problem, which is the natural quantum analogue of classical constraint satisfaction problems. One way of making the problem more physically meaningful is to restrict the Hamiltonian in question by picking its terms from a fixed set S. Examples of such special cases are the Heisenberg and Ising models from condensed-matter physics. In this work we characterise the complexity of this problem for all 2-local qubit Hamiltonians. Depending on the subset S, the problem falls into one of the following categories: in P, NP-complete, polynomial-time equivalent to the Ising model with transverse magnetic fields, or QMA-complete. The third of these classes contains NP and is contained within StoqMA. The characterisation holds even if S does not contain any 1-local terms, for example, we prove for the first time QMA-completeness of the Heisenberg and XY interactions in this setting. If S is assumed to contain all 1-local terms, which is the setting considered by previous work, we have a characterisation that goes beyond 2-local interactions: for any constant k, all k-local qubit Hamiltonians whose terms are picked from a fixed set S correspond to problems either in P, polynomial-time equivalent to the Ising model with transverse magnetic fields, or QMA-complete. These results are a quantum analogue of Schaefer's dichotomy theorem for boolean constraint satisfaction problems.
The calculation of ground-state energies of physical systems can be formalized as the kkk-local Hamiltonian problem, which is a natural quantum analogue of classical constraint satisfaction problems. One way of making the problem more physically meaningful is to restrict the Hamiltonian in question by picking its terms from a fixed set S\mathcal{S}S and scaling them by arbitrary weights. Examples of such special cases are the Heisenberg and Ising models from condensed-matter physics. In this work we characterize the complexity of this problem for all 2-local qubit Hamiltonians. Depending on the subset S\mathcal{S}S, the problem falls into one of the following categories: in P\mathsf{ P}P; NP\mathsf{NP}NP-complete; polynomial-time equivalent to the Ising model with transverse magnetic fields; or QMA\mathsf{QMA}QMA-complete. The third of these classes has been shown to be StoqMA\mathsf{StoqMA}StoqMA-complete by Bravyi and Hastings. The characterization holds even if S\mathcal{S}S does not contain any 1-local terms; for example, we prove for the first time QMA\mathsf{QMA}QMA-completeness of the Heisenberg and XY interactions in this setting. If S\mathcal{S}S is assumed to contain all 1-local terms, which is the setting considered by previous work, we have a characterization that goes beyond 2-local interactions: for any constant kkk, all kkk-local qubit Hamiltonians whose terms are picked from a fixed set S\mathcal{S}S correspond to problems either in P\mathsf{P}P; polynomial-time equivalent to the Ising model with transverse magnetic fields; or QMA\mathsf{QMA}QMA-complete. These results are a quantum analogue of the maximization variant of Schaefer's dichotomy theorem for Boolean constraint satisfaction problems.
The QMA-completeness of the local Hamiltonian problem is a landmark result of the field of Hamiltonian complexity that studies the computational complexity of problems in quantum many-body physics. Since its proposal, substantial effort has been invested in better understanding the problem for physically motivated important families of Hamiltonians. In particular, the QMA-completeness of approximating the ground state energy of local Hamiltonians has been extended to the case where the Hamiltonians are geometrically local in one and two spatial dimensions. Among those physically motivated Hamiltonians, stoquastic Hamiltonians play a particularly crucial role, as they constitute the manifestly sign-free Hamiltonians in Monte Carlo approaches. Interestingly, for such Hamiltonians, the problem at hand becomes more ''classical'', being hard for the class MA (the randomized version of NP) and its complexity has tight connections with derandomization. In this work, we prove that both the two- and one-dimensional geometrically local analogues remain MA-hard with high enough qudit dimension. Moreover, we show that related problems are StoqMA-complete.
We study the complexity of the Local Hamiltonian Problem (denoted as LH-MIN) in the special case when a Hamiltonian obeys conditions of the Perron-Frobenius theorem: all off-diagonal matrix elements in the standard basis are real and non-positive. We will call such Hamiltonians, which are common in the natural world, stoquastic. An equivalent characterization of stoquastic Hamiltonians is that they have an entry-wise non-negative Gibbs density matrix for any temperature. We prove that LH-MIN for stoquastic Hamiltonians belongs to the complexity class AM -- a probabilistic version of NP with two rounds of communication between the prover and the verifier. We also show that 2-local stoquastic LH-MIN is hard for the class MA. With the additional promise of having a polynomial spectral gap, we show that stoquastic LH-MIN belongs to the class POSTBPP=BPPpath -- a generalization of BPP in which a post-selective readout is allowed. This last result also shows that any problem solved by adiabatic quantum computation using stoquastic Hamiltonians lies in PostBPP.
Despite having an unnatural definition, StoqMA\mathsf{StoqMA}StoqMA plays a central role in Hamiltonian complexity, e.g., in the classification theorem of the complexity of Hamiltonians by Cubitt and Montanaro (SICOMP 2016). Moreover, it lies between the two randomized extensions of NP\mathsf{NP}NP, MA\mathsf{MA}MA and AM\mathsf{AM}AM. Therefore, understanding the exact power of StoqMA\mathsf{StoqMA}StoqMA (and hopefully collapsing it with more natural complexity classes) is of great interest for different reasons. In this work, we take a step further in understanding this complexity class by showing that the Stoquastic Sparse Hamiltonians problem (StoqSH\mathsf{StoqSH}StoqSH) is in StoqMA\mathsf{StoqMA}StoqMA. Since Stoquastic Local Hamiltonians are StoqMA\mathsf{StoqMA}StoqMA-hard, this implies that StoqSH\mathsf{StoqSH}StoqSH is StoqMA\mathsf{StoqMA}StoqMA-complete. We complement this result by showing that the separable version of StoqSH\mathsf{StoqSH}StoqSH is StoqMA(2)\mathsf{StoqMA}(2)StoqMA(2)-complete, where StoqMA(2)\mathsf{StoqMA}(2)StoqMA(2) is the version of StoqMA\mathsf{StoqMA}StoqMA that receives two unentangled proofs.