Simple families of quantum Hamiltonians can simulate general many-body systems at arbitrary precision through the use of perturbative gadgets, however this generally requires interaction strengths spanning many orders of magnitude which scale polynomially in the system size and inverse precision, resulting in physically unrealisable systems. In this work, we show that for non-critical systems these required scalings can be exponentially reduced through classical post-processing, by simulating the model at smaller energy scales and extrapolating observables to the perturbative limit. In particular, we show that both local and extensive properties of thermal states with exponentially decaying correlations and ground states with a sufficiently stable gap can be simulated using gadgets whose interaction strengths scale only polylogarithmically in the inverse precision and the system size. As a key tool, we develop a generalised treatment of the local Schrieffer-Wolff transformation for geometrically quasi-local Hamiltonians over many energy scales, facilitating the analysis of perturbative gadget Hamiltonians without extensive global energy penalities, which may be of independent interest.
Simple families of quantum Hamiltonians can simulate general many-body systems at arbitrary precision through the use of perturbative gadgets, however this generally requires interaction strengths spanning many orders of magnitude which scale polynomially in the system size and inverse precision, resulting in physically unrealisable systems. In this work, we show that for non-critical systems these required scalings can be exponentially reduced through classical post-processing, by simulating the model at smaller energy scales and extrapolating observables to the perturbative limit. In particular, we show that both local and extensive properties of thermal states with exponentially decaying correlations and ground states with a sufficiently stable gap can be simulated using gadgets whose interaction strengths scale only polylogarithmically in the inverse precision and the system size. As a key tool, we develop a generalised treatment of the local Schrieffer-Wolff transformation for geometrically quasi-local Hamiltonians over many energy scales, facilitating the analysis of perturbative gadget Hamiltonians without extensive global energy penalities, which may be of independent interest.
Abstract: Fundamentally, it is believed that interactions between physical objects are two-body. Perturbative gadgets are one way to break up an effective many-body coupling into pairwise interactions: a Hamiltonian with high interaction strength introduces a low-energy space in which the effective theory appears k-body and approximates a target Hamiltonian to within precision ϵ. One caveat of existing constructions is that the interaction strength generally scales exponentially in the locality of the terms to be approximated. In this work we propose a many-body Hamiltonian construction which introduces only a single separate energy scale of order Θ(1/N2+δ), for a small parameter δ>0, and for N terms in the target Hamiltonian Ht=∑i=1Nhi to be simulated: in its low-energy subspace, our constructed system can approximate any such target Hamiltonian Ht with norm ratios r=maxi, j∈{1, …, N}‖hi‖/‖hj‖=O(exp(exp(polyN))) to within relative precision O(N-δ). This comes at the expense of increasing the locality by at most one, and adding an at most poly-sized ancillary system for each coupling; interactions on the ancillary system are geometrically local, and can be translationally invariant. In order to prove this claim, we borrow a technique from high energy physics—where matter fields obtain effective properties (such as mass) from interactions with an exchange particle—and employ a tiling Hamiltonian to discard all cross-terms at higher expansion orders of a Feynman–Dyson series expansion. As an application, we discuss implications for QMA-hardness of the Local Hamiltonian problem, and argue that “almost” translational invariance—defined as arbitrarily small relative variations of the strength of the local terms—is as good as non-translational invariance in many of the constructions used throughout Hamiltonian complexity theory. We furthermore show that the choice of geared limit of many-body systems, where e.g. width and height of a lattice are taken to infinity in a specific relation, can have different complexity-theoretic implications: even for translationally invariant models, changing the geared limit can vary the hardness of finding the ground state energy with respect to a given promise gap from computationally trivial, to QMAEXP-, or even BQEXPSPACE-complete.
Abstract Fundamentally, it is believed that interactions between physical objects are two-body. Perturbative gadgets are one way to break up an effective many-body coupling into pairwise interactions: a Hamiltonian with high interaction strength introduces a low-energy space in which the effective theory appearsk-body and approximates a target Hamiltonian to within precision ϵ ϵ . One caveat of existing constructions is that the interaction strength generally scales exponentially in the locality of the terms to be approximated. In this work we propose a many-body Hamiltonian construction which introduces only a single separate energy scale of order Θ(1/N2+δ) Θ(1/N2+δ) , for a small parameter δ>0 δ>0 , and forNterms in the target Hamiltonian Ht=∑i=1Nhi Ht=∑i=1Nhi to be simulated: in its low-energy subspace, our constructed system can approximate any such target Hamiltonian Ht Ht with norm ratios r=maxi,j∈{1,…,N}∥hi∥/∥hj∥=O(exp(exp(polyN))) r=maxi,j∈{1,…,N}‖hi‖/‖hj‖=O(exp(exp(polyN))) to withinrelativeprecision O(N−δ) O(N-δ) . This comes at the expense of increasing the locality by at most one, and adding an at most poly-sized ancillary system for each coupling; interactions on the ancillary system are geometrically local, and can be translationally invariant. In order to prove this claim, we borrow a technique from high energy physics—where matter fields obtain effective properties (such as mass) from interactions with an exchange particle—and employ a tiling Hamiltonian to discard all cross-terms at higher expansion orders of a Feynman–Dyson series expansion. As an application, we discuss implications for QMA-hardness of theLocal Hamiltonianproblem, and argue that “almost” translational invariance—defined as arbitrarily small relative variations of the strength of the local terms—is as good as non-translational invariance in many of the constructions used throughout Hamiltonian complexity theory. We furthermore show that the choice of geared limit of many-body systems, where e.g. width and height of a lattice are taken to infinity in a specific relation, can have different complexity-theoretic implications: even for translationally invariant models, changing the geared limit can vary the hardness of finding the ground state energy with respect to a given promise gap from computationally trivial, to QMAEXP-, or even BQEXPSPACE-complete.
Perturbative gadgets are used to construct a quantum Hamiltonian whose low-energy subspace approximates a given quantum k-local Hamiltonian up to an absolute error ϵ. Typically, gadget constructions involve terms with large interaction strengths of order poly(ϵ−1). Here we present a 2-body gadget construction and prove that it approximates a Hamiltonian of interaction strength γ=O(1) up to absolute error ϵ≪γ using interactions of strength O(ϵ) instead of the usual inverse polynomial in ϵ. A key component in our proof is a new condition for the convergence of the perturbation series, allowing our gadget construction to be applied in parallel on multiple many-body terms. We also discuss how to apply this gadget construction for approximating 3- and k-local Hamiltonians. The price we pay for using much weaker interactions is a large overhead in the number of ancillary qubits, and the number of interaction terms per particle, both of which scale as O(poly(ϵ−1)). Our strong-from-weak gadgets have their primary application in complexity theory (QMA hardness of restricted Hamiltonians, a generalized area law counterexample, gap amplification), but could also motivate practical implementations with several weak interactions simulating a much stronger quantum many-body interaction.
We consider two related tasks: (a) estimating a parameterisation of a given Gibbs state and expectation values of Lipschitz observables on this state; and (b) learning the expectation values of local observables within a thermal or quantum phase of matter. In both cases, we wish to minimise the number of samples we use to learn these properties to a given precision. For the first task, we develop new techniques to learn parameterisations of classes of systems, including quantum Gibbs states of non-commuting Hamiltonians with exponential decay of correlations and the approximate Markov property. We show it is possible to infer the expectation values of all extensive properties of the state from a number of copies that not only scales polylogarithmically with the system size, but polynomially in the observable's locality -- an exponential improvement. This set of properties includes expected values of quasi-local observables and entropies. For the second task, we develop efficient algorithms for learning observables in a phase of matter of a quantum system. By exploiting the locality of the Hamiltonian, we show that M local observables can be learned with probability 1−δ to precision ε with using only N=O(log(δM)epolylog(ε−1)) samples -- an exponential improvement on the precision over previous bounds. Our results apply to both families of ground states of Hamiltonians displaying local topological quantum order, and thermal phases of matter with exponential decay of correlations. In addition, our sample complexity applies to the worse case setting whereas previous results only applied on average. Furthermore, we develop tools of independent interest, such as robust shadow tomography algorithms, Gibbs approximations to ground states, and generalisations of transportation cost inequalities for Gibbs states.
We show how to map a given n-qubit target Hamiltonian with bounded-strength k-body interactions onto a simulator Hamiltonian with two-body interactions, such that the ground-state energy of the target and the simulator Hamiltonians are the same up to an extensive error O(epsilon n) for arbitrary small epsilon. The strength of the interactions in the simulator Hamiltonian depends on epsilon and k but does not depend on n. We accomplish this reduction using a new way of deriving an effective low-energy Hamiltonian which relies on the Schrieffer-Wolff transformation of many-body physics.
We prove that deciding the Berry phase for parameterised 2-local qubit Hamiltonians is BQP-complete when presented with a classical description of a guiding state, promised to overlap with the ground state of the system. Our results extend to systems with weighted Heisenberg interactions and when restricted to a 2D square or triangular lattice geometry. The techniques we develop leverage the Schrieffer--Wolff transformation, typically used in the construction of perturbative gadget reductions for local Hamiltonian problems, extending it to parameterised families of Hamiltonians. We demonstrate that there exists a choice of parameterised simulator Hamiltonians whose Berry phase well-approximates that of a parameterised target family. Using the perturbative gadget reduction framework of Oliveira and Terhal and of Schuch and Verstraete, we adapt the arguments to parameterised interactions and demonstrate the error bounds in the resulting simulation can be controlled. Additionally, we provide an explicit proof that families of 1-local Hamiltonians have a Berry phase that can be efficiently computed to inverse-polynomial precision. This establishes a complexity transition between 1-local and 2-local Hamiltonian families.