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arXiv:2207.01692

Estimating gate complexities for the site-by-site preparation of fermionic vacua

Troy J. Sewell, Aniruddha Bapat, Stephen P. Jordan

Published Jul 4, 2022• 0 citations
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Abstract

An important aspect of quantum simulation is the preparation of physically interesting states on a quantum computer, and this task can often be costly or challenging to implement. A digital, ``site-by-site'' scheme of state preparation was introduced in arXiv:1911.03505 as a way to prepare the vacuum state of certain fermionic field theory Hamiltonians with a mass gap. More generally, this algorithm may be used to prepare ground states of Hamiltonians by adding one site at a time as long as successive intermediate ground states share a non-zero overlap and the Hamiltonian has a non-vanishing spectral gap at finite lattice size. In this paper, we study the ground state overlap as a function of the number of sites for a range of quadratic fermionic Hamiltonians. Using analytical formulas known for free fermions, we are able to explore the large-$N$ behavior and draw conclusions about the state overlap. For all models studied, we find that the overlap remains large (e.g. $> 0.1$) up to large lattice sizes ($N=64,72$) except near quantum phase transitions or in the presence of gapless edge modes. For one-dimensional systems, we further find that two $N/2$-site ground states also share a large overlap with the $N$-site ground state everywhere except a region near the phase boundary. Based on these numerical results, we additionally propose a recursive alternative to the site-by-site state preparation algorithm.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2207.01692

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An important aspect of quantum simulation is the preparation of physically interesting states on a quantum computer, and this task can often be costly or challenging to implement. A digital, ``site-by-site'' scheme of state preparation was introduced in arXiv:1911.03505 as a way to prepare the vacuum state of certain fermionic field theory Hamiltonians with a mass gap. More generally, this algorithm may be used to prepare ground states of Hamiltonians by adding one site at a time as long as successive intermediate ground states share a non-zero overlap and the Hamiltonian has a non-vanishing spectral gap at finite lattice size. In this paper, we study the ground state overlap as a function of the number of sites for a range of quadratic fermionic Hamiltonians. Using analytical formulas known for free fermions, we are able to explore the large-NNN behavior and draw conclusions about the state overlap. For all models studied, we find that the overlap remains large (e.g. >0.1> 0.1>0.1) up to large lattice sizes (N=64,72N=64,72N=64,72) except near quantum phase transitions or in the presence of gapless edge modes. For one-dimensional systems, we further find that two N/2N/2N/2-site ground states also share a large overlap with the NNN-site ground state everywhere except a region near the phase boundary. Based on these numerical results, we additionally propose a recursive alternative to the site-by-site state preparation algorithm.
We present a cooling algorithm for ground state preparation of fermionic Hamiltonians. Our algorithm makes use of the Hamiltonian simulation of the considered system coupled to an ancillary fridge, which is regularly reset to its known ground state. We derive suitable interaction Hamiltonians that originate from ladder operators of the free theory and initiate resonant gaps between system and fridge. We further propose a spectroscopic scan to find the relevant eigenenergies of the system using energy measurements on the fridge. With these insights, we design a ground state cooling algorithm for fermionic systems that is efficient, i.e. its runtime is polynomial in the system size, as long as the initial state is prepared in a low-energy sector of polynomial size. We achieve the latter via a pseudo-adiabatic sweep from a parameter regime whose ground state can be easily prepared. We estimate that our algorithm has a polynomial runtime for systems where the spectral gap decreases at most polynomially in system size, and is faster than the adiabatic algorithm for a large range of settings. We generalize the algorithm to prepare thermal states and demonstrate our findings on the Fermi-Hubbard model.
Answering whether quantum computers can efficiently simulate quantum field theories has both theoretical and practical motivation. From the theoretical point of view, it answers the question of whether a hypothetical computer that utilizes quantum field theory would be more powerful than other quantum computers. From the practical point of view, when reliable quantum computers are eventually built, these algorithms can help us better understand the underlying physics that govern our world. In the best known quantum algorithms for simulating quantum field theories, the time scaling is dominated by initial state preparation. In this paper, we exclusively focus on state preparation and present a heuristic algorithm that can prepare the vacuum of fermionic systems in more general cases and more efficiently than previous methods. With our method, state preparation is no longer the bottleneck, as its runtime has the same asymptotic scaling with the desired precision as the remainder of the simulation algorithm. We numerically demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for the 1+1 dimensional Gross-Neveu model.
We propose quantum algorithms for projective ground-state preparation and calculations of the many-body Green's functions directly in frequency domain. The algorithms are based on the linear combination of unitary (LCU) operations and essentially only use quantum resources. To prepare the ground state, we construct the operator exp⁡(−τH^2){\exp}(-τ\hat{H}^2)exp(−τH^2) using Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation by LCU and apply it on an easy-to-prepare initial state. Our projective state preparation procedure saturates the near-optimal scaling, O(1γΔlog⁡1γη)\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{γΔ} \log \frac{1}{γη})O(γΔ1​logγη1​), of other currently known algorithms, in terms of the spectral-gap lower bound ΔΔΔ, the additive error ηηη in the state vector, and the overlap lower bound γγγ between the initial state and the exact ground state. It is straightforward to combine our algorithm with spectral-gap amplification technique to achieve quadratically improved scaling O(1/Δ)\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrtΔ)O(1/Δ​) for ground-state preparation of frustration-free Hamiltonians, which we demonstrate with numerical results of the qqq-deformed XXZ chain. To compute the Green's functions, including the single-particle and other response functions, we act on the prepared ground state with the retarded resolvent operator R(ω+iΓ;H^)R(ω+ iΓ; \hat{H})R(ω+iΓ;H^) in the LCU form derived from the Fourier-Laplace integral transform (FIT). Our resolvent algorithm has O(1Γ2log⁡1Γε)\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{Γ^2} \log\frac{1}{Γε})O(Γ21​logΓε1​) complexity scaling for the frequency resolution ΓΓΓ of the response functions and the targeted error εεε, while classical algorithms for FIT usually have polynomial scaling over the error εεε. To illustrate the complexity scaling of our algorithms, we provide numerical results for their application to the paradigmatic Fermi-Hubbard model on a one-dimensional lattice with different numbers of sites.
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.
Quantum computers can accurately compute ground state energies using phase estimation, but this requires a guiding state that has significant overlap with the true ground state. For large molecules and extended materials, it becomes difficult to find guiding states with good ground state overlap for growing molecule sizes. Additionally, the required number of qubits and quantum gates may become prohibitively large. One approach for dealing with these challenges is to use a quantum embedding method, which allows a reduction to one or multiple smaller quantum cores embedded in a larger quantum region. In such situations, it is unclear how the embedding method affects the hardness of constructing good guiding states. In this work, we therefore investigate the preparation of guiding states in the context of quantum embedding methods. We extend previous work on quantum impurity problems, a framework in which we can rigorously analyze the embedding of a subset of orbitals. While there exist results for optimal active orbital space selection in terms of energy minimization, we rigorously demonstrate how the same principles can be used to define selected orbital spaces for state preparation in terms of the overlap with the ground state. Moreover, we perform numerical studies of molecular systems relevant to biochemistry, one field in which quantum embedding methods are required due to the large size of biomacromolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. We investigate two different embedding strategies which can exhibit qualitatively different orbital entanglement. In all cases, we demonstrate that the easy-to-obtain mean-field state will have a sufficiently high overlap with the target state to perform quantum phase estimation.
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