Abstract Accurate state preparation is a critical bottleneck in many quantum algorithms, particularly those for ground-state energy estimation. Even in fault-tolerant quantum computing, preparing a quantum state with sufficient overlap with the desired eigenstate remains a major challenge. To address this, we develop a unified cost-aware framework for filtered-state preparation that enhances the overlap of a given input state through spectral filtering. The framework covers polynomial and trigonometric realizations of filters and makes explicit the trade-off among overlap amplification, preparation success probability, and filter-implementation cost. As representative examples, we analyze Gaussian filters and introduce a modified Krylov-subspace-based filter that improves the success-probability/overlap trade-off relevant to filtered state preparation. Within this framework, we study a filtered variant of quantum phase estimation (FQPE) that mitigates the unfavorable dependence on the initial overlap present in standard quantum phase estimation. Numerical experiments on Fermi–Hubbard models show that FQPE reduces the total runtime by more than two orders of magnitude in the high-precision regime, with overlap amplification exceeding a factor of one hundred.
Abstract Accurate state preparation is a critical bottleneck in many quantum algorithms, particularly those for ground-state energy estimation. Even in fault-tolerant quantum computing, preparing a quantum state with sufficient overlap with the desired eigenstate remains a major challenge. To address this, we develop a unified cost-aware framework for filtered-state preparation that enhances the overlap of a given input state through spectral filtering. The framework covers polynomial and trigonometric realizations of filters and makes explicit the trade-off among overlap amplification, preparation success probability, and filter-implementation cost. As representative examples, we analyze Gaussian filters and introduce a modified Krylov-subspace-based filter that improves the success-probability/overlap trade-off relevant to filtered state preparation. Within this framework, we study a filtered variant of quantum phase estimation (FQPE) that mitigates the unfavorable dependence on the initial overlap present in standard quantum phase estimation. Numerical experiments on Fermi–Hubbard models show that FQPE reduces the total runtime by more than two orders of magnitude in the high-precision regime, with overlap amplification exceeding a factor of one hundred.
Quantum simulation is expected to be a main application of quantum computers with realistic utility in quantum chemistry, materials science and beyond. However, preparing excited or general eigenstates is a central challenge, particularly when the desired eigenvalue is not known in advance, or when the overlap with the initial state is insufficient. We introduce the Dominant Eigenstate Filtering via Eigenprobability Amplification and Thresholding (DEFEAT) algorithm that identifies and filters the eigenstate with the largest overlap with the supplied initial state. Our key observation is that we do not need prior knowledge of the target eigenvalue, as we construct efficient twirling superoperators that map initial states to eigenprobability density operators ρ, diagonal in the Hamiltonian eigenbasis and encoding its spectral weights, alongside its block-encoding implementation. Our crucial innovation is the quadratic amplification of probabilities via the factorisation ρ=ρsqrt†ρsqrt, analogous to the recently introduced sum-of-squares spectral amplification (SOSSA), which we use here to amplify the separation between dominant and subdominant components. Thresholding then yields the dominant-eigenstate projector. Compared with conventional phase estimation, DEFEAT improves the dependence on the overlap with the initial state while requiring substantially fewer ancillary qubits. We prove that the query complexity of the filtering step is optimal up to logarithmic factors and establish a complementary lower bound for eigenstate preparation under purified query access to ρ. We validate in numerical simulations that the convergence rate of DEFEAT matches our theoretical results. Our results provide a general eigenvalue-agnostic primitive for dominant eigenstate filtering and preparation, and for estimating properties of dominant eigenstates.
We develop a phase-estimation method with a distinct feature: its maximal run time (which determines the circuit depth) is δ/ , where is the target precision, and the preconstant δ can be arbitrarily close to 0 as the initial state approaches the target eigenstate.The total cost of the algorithm satisfies the Heisenberg-limited scaling O( -1 ).As a result, our algorithm may significantly reduce the circuit depth for performing phase-estimation tasks on early fault-tolerant quantum computers.The key technique is a simple subroutine called quantum complex exponential least squares (QCELS).Our algorithm can be readily applied to reduce the circuit depth for estimating the ground-state energy of a quantum Hamiltonian, when the overlap between the initial state and the ground state is large.If this initial overlap is small, we can combine our method with the Fourier-filtering method developed in [Lin and Tong, PRX Quantum 3, 010318, 2022], and the resulting algorithm provably reduces the circuit depth in the presence of a large relative overlap compared to .The relative-overlap condition is similar to a spectral-gap assumption but it is aware of the information in the initial state and is therefore applicable to certain Hamiltonians with small spectral gaps.We observe that the circuit depth can be reduced by around 2 orders of magnitude in numerical experiments under various settings.
Quantum computers are anticipated to provide computational advantages over classical devices for specific classes of problems.In quantum chemistry, such an advantage can be achieved on fault-tolerant quantum computers (FTQCs) using quantum phase estimation (QPE), which can, in principle, provide accurate electronic energies with polynomial scaling.However, the practical success of QPE and related algorithms critically depends on the availability of high-quality initial quantum states with sufficient overlap with the target eigenstates.Moreover, even FTQCs are expected to be limited in size and total computational resources for the foreseeable future, restricting quantum calculations to reduced subspaces and allowing only a partial treatment of electronic correlation.For chemically meaningful predictions, the remaining correlation effects must therefore be recovered through post-processing.
We introduce a classical estimator for the post-processing of quantum phase estimation (QPE) data when a single target phase is isolated within a known interval, as is typical of ground state energy estimation of gapped systems. Our estimator filters the QPE signal within this promise region and recovers the phase through a moment-projection routine, which is robust to both external spurious phases and experimental noise. In the noiseless case this achieves an exponential suppression of bias with respect to a naive mean estimator. In the presence of global depolarizing noise the bias is exponentially small in the circuit depth t, and the variance is O(t−2F−2) for circuit fidelity F. This improves by a factor of t2 over a naive shifted-and-rescaled-mean approach. To mitigate realistic circuit-level noise, we combine our method with the explicit unbiasing scheme described in [Dutkiewicz et al., 2025]. This yields an overhead interpolating between the F−4 scaling typical of explicitly unbiased error mitigation and a reduced F−2 scaling when the noise samples fall outside the promise interval. We validate our estimators on a small-scale simulation of the Ising model, observing better-than-expected performance for a global depolarizing noise approximation. This robustness to both multiple eigenvalues and realistic noise makes limited-depth phase estimation practical for early fault tolerant quantum experiments.
Phase estimation, due to Kitaev \cite{Kit95}, is one of the most fundamental subroutines in quantum computing. In the basic scenario, one is given black-box access to a unitary U , and an eigenstate | ψ ⟩ of U with unknown eigenvalue e i θ , and the task is to estimate the eigenphase θ within ± δ , with high probability. The cost of an algorithm for us is the number of applications of U and U − 1 .We tightly characterize the cost of several variants of phase estimation where we are no longer given an eigenstate, but are required to estimate the maximum eigenphase of U , aided by advice in the form of states (or a unitary preparing those states) which are promised to have at least a certain overlap γ with the top eigenspace.We give algorithms and nearly matching lower bounds for all ranges of parameters.We show that a small number of copies of the advice state (or of an advice-preparing unitary) are not significantly better than having no advice at all. We also show that having lots of advice (applications of the advice-preparing unitary) does not significantly reduce cost, and neither does knowledge of the eigenbasis of U . We immediately obtain a lower bound on the complexity of the Unitary recurrence time problem, resolving an open question of She and Yuen \cite{SY23}.Lastly, we study how efficiently one can reduce the error probability in the basic phase-estimation scenario. We show that a phase-estimation algorithm with precision δ and error probability ϵ has cost Ω ( 1 δ log 1 ϵ ) , matching an easy upper bound. This contrasts with some other scenarios in quantum computing (e.g., search) where error-probability reduction costs only a factor O ( log ( 1 / ϵ ) ) . Our lower bound uses a variant of the polynomial method with trigonometric polynomials.
We present a quantum eigenstate filtering algorithm based on quantum signal processing (QSP) and minimax polynomials. The algorithm allows us to efficiently prepare a target eigenstate of a given Hamiltonian, if we have access to an initial state with non-trivial overlap with the target eigenstate and have a reasonable lower bound for the spectral gap. We apply this algorithm to the quantum linear system problem (QLSP), and present two algorithms based on quantum adiabatic computing (AQC) and quantum Zeno effect respectively. Both algorithms prepare the final solution as a pure state, and achieves the near optimal O ~ ( d κ log ( 1 / ϵ ) ) query complexity for a d -sparse matrix, where κ is the condition number, and ϵ is the desired precision. Neither algorithm uses phase estimation or amplitude amplification.