Quantum simulators enable the exploration of complex quantum phenomena in condensed-matter systems by reproducing their dynamics on controllable quantum devices. However, experimental constraints often restrict the class of Hamiltonians that can be realized natively. Hamiltonian engineering addresses this limitation by expanding the set of accessible Hamiltonians beyond the fixed system Hamiltonian provided by the hardware. We introduce a framework for fermionic Hamiltonian engineering based on interleaving free evolution under the system Hamiltonian with a sequence of experimentally feasible local fermionic unitaries. The required sequences and free-evolution times are obtained efficiently through a linear program, enabling effective time evolution under a broad class of target Hamiltonians. In particular, our method realizes arbitrary complex tunnelling coefficients, constrained only by the connectivity of the underlying system Hamiltonian. We further show that symmetries of the Hamiltonian engineering task can be exploited to drastically reduce the cost of computing the control parameters, and that errors arising from finite pulse times can be compensated within the same framework through a simple modification of the linear program. To our knowledge, this is the first automated method to realize locally tunable artificial gauge fields in interacting fermionic lattice models using only site-resolved energy shifts as control. We demonstrate the method by engineering the dynamics of interacting Fermi-Hubbard chains with complex tunnelling coefficients and of the Harper-Hofstadter model on a 1088-mode lattice. For the latter, we exploit the translation symmetry of the model to determine a provably optimal six-pulse sequence that produces the desired dynamics independent of the lattice size.
Quantum simulators enable the exploration of complex quantum phenomena in condensed-matter systems by reproducing their dynamics on controllable quantum devices. However, experimental constraints often restrict the class of Hamiltonians that can be realized natively. Hamiltonian engineering addresses this limitation by expanding the set of accessible Hamiltonians beyond the fixed system Hamiltonian provided by the hardware. We introduce a framework for fermionic Hamiltonian engineering based on interleaving free evolution under the system Hamiltonian with a sequence of experimentally feasible local fermionic unitaries. The required sequences and free-evolution times are obtained efficiently through a linear program, enabling effective time evolution under a broad class of target Hamiltonians. In particular, our method realizes arbitrary complex tunnelling coefficients, constrained only by the connectivity of the underlying system Hamiltonian. We further show that symmetries of the Hamiltonian engineering task can be exploited to drastically reduce the cost of computing the control parameters, and that errors arising from finite pulse times can be compensated within the same framework through a simple modification of the linear program. To our knowledge, this is the first automated method to realize locally tunable artificial gauge fields in interacting fermionic lattice models using only site-resolved energy shifts as control. We demonstrate the method by engineering the dynamics of interacting Fermi-Hubbard chains with complex tunnelling coefficients and of the Harper-Hofstadter model on a 1088-mode lattice. For the latter, we exploit the translation symmetry of the model to determine a provably optimal six-pulse sequence that produces the desired dynamics independent of the lattice size.
Quantum simulators enable the exploration of complex quantum phenomena in condensed-matter systems by reproducing their dynamics on controllable quantum devices. However, experimental constraints often restrict the class of Hamiltonians that can be realized natively. Hamiltonian engineering addresses this limitation by expanding the set of accessible target Hamiltonians from a fixed system Hamiltonian defined by the hardware. We introduce a new framework for fermionic Hamiltonian engineering based on conjugating free evolution under the system Hamiltonian with sequences of experimentally feasible local fermionic unitaries. The required sequences and free-evolution times are obtained efficiently via a linear program. By interleaving system evolution with these local unitaries, our method realizes effective time evolution under a broad class of target Hamiltonians, with intrinsic robustness to finite-pulse-time errors. In particular, we demonstrate that arbitrary complex tunnelling coefficients can be realized, constrained only by the connectivity of the underlying system Hamiltonian. We illustrate this capability by engineering the dynamics of the non-interacting Harper-Hofstadter model on a 1088-mode lattice and an interacting Fermi-Hubbard chain with complex tunnelling coefficients. By construction, our approach avoids the continuous energy absorption inherent to Floquet engineering.
Hamiltonian engineering (HE) simulates quantum dynamics under a target Hamiltonian using a native entangling system Hamiltonian and restricted control, with applications from quantum gate design to analog quantum simulation. Observing that, for many systems, formulating HE as a linear program only requires specific commutation relations between the control pulses and the system Hamiltonian, we provide a unified framework for broad classes of 2-local qubit, qudit, and fermionic systems. We reformulate time-optimal HE as a complex k-cut polytope problem, with k the number of distinct phases in these commutation relations, and prove it NP-complete for every finite k. We therefore relax the polytope to the elliptope and apply a Krivine-type rounding, yielding pulses informed by the system and target Hamiltonians, which we then use in a linear program. We derive how many informed pulses are necessary and sufficient for the linear program to be reliably feasible. Additionally mixing in uniformly sampled pulses guarantees a solution close to the relaxation value from O(m) pulses, with m the number of interaction terms. Together with upper and lower bounds on the optimal quantum run time, this yields an O(m) approximation ratio. In benchmarks on a fully connected Ising model, a chiral clock model for qudits, and the fermionic Harper-Hofstadter model, our approach attains near-optimal quantum run times wherever the optimum is computable, reaches run times that saturate with the lattice size in the fermionic case, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods with O(m) pulses. This establishes a unified approach with provable guarantees to the automatic programming of analog quantum simulators.
Implementing the time evolution under a desired target Hamiltonian is critical for various applications in quantum science. Due to the exponential increase of parameters in the system size and due to experimental imperfections, this task can be challenging in quantum many-body settings. We introduce an efficient and robust scheme to engineer arbitrary local many-body Hamiltonians. To this end, our scheme applies single-qubit π or π / 2 pulses to an always-on system Hamiltonian, which we assume to be native to a given platform. These sequences are constructed by efficiently solving a linear program (LP) which minimizes the total evolution time. In this way, we can engineer target Hamiltonians that are only limited by the locality of the interactions in the system Hamiltonian. Based on average Hamiltonian theory and by using robust composite pulses, we make our schemes robust against errors, including finite-pulse-time errors and various control errors. To demonstrate the performance of our scheme, we provide numerical simulations. In particular, we solve the Hamiltonian-engineering problem on a laptop for arbitrary two-local Hamiltonians on a two-dimensional square lattice with 196 qubits in only 60 s. Moreover, we simulate the engineering of general Heisenberg Hamiltonians from Ising Hamiltonians with imperfect single-qubit pulses for smaller system sizes, and achieve a fidelity larger than 99.9%, which is orders of magnitude better than nonrobust implementations.
Quantum simulation is a promising near term application for quantum information processors with the potential to solve computationally intractable problems using just a few dozen interacting qubits. A range of experimental platforms have recently demonstrated the basic functionality of quantum simulation applied to quantum magnetism, quantum phase transitions and relativistic quantum mechanics. However, in all cases, the physics of the underlying hardware restricts the achievable inter-particle interactions and forms a serious constraint on the versatility of the simulators. To broaden the scope of these analog devices, we develop a suite of pulse sequences that permit a user to efficiently realize average Hamiltonians that are beyond the native interactions of the system. Specifically, this approach permits the generation of all symmetrically coupled translation-invariant two-body Hamiltonians with homogeneous on-site terms, a class which includes all spin- XYZ chains, but generalized to include long-range couplings. Our work builds on previous work proving that universal simulation is possible using both entangling gates and single-qubit unitaries. We show that determining the appropriate 'program' of unitary pulse sequences which implements an arbitrary Hamiltonian transformation can be formulated as a linear program over functions defined by those pulse sequences, running in polynomial time and scaling efficiently in hardware resources. Our analysis extends from circuit model quantum information to adiabatic quantum evolutions, representing an important and broad-based success in applying functional analysis to the field of quantum information.
Implementing the time evolution under a desired target Hamiltonian is critical for various applications in quantum science. Due to the exponential increase of parameters in the system size and due to experimental imperfections, this task can be challenging in quantum many-body settings. We introduce an efficient and robust scheme to engineer arbitrary local many-body Hamiltonians. To this end, our scheme applies single-qubit π or π/2 pulses to an always-on system Hamiltonian, which we assume to be native to a given platform. These sequences are constructed by efficiently solving a linear program (LP) which minimizes the total evolution time. In this way, we can engineer target Hamiltonians that are only limited by the locality of the interactions in the system Hamiltonian. Based on average Hamiltonian theory and by using robust composite pulses, we make our schemes robust against errors, including finite-pulse-time errors and various control errors. To demonstrate the performance of our scheme, we provide numerical simulations. In particular, we solve the Hamiltonian-engineering problem on a laptop for arbitrary two-local Hamiltonians on a two-dimensional square lattice with 196 qubits in only 60 s. Moreover, we simulate the engineering of general Heisenberg Hamiltonians from Ising Hamiltonians with imperfect single-qubit pulses for smaller system sizes, and achieve a fidelity larger than 99.9%, which is orders of magnitude better than nonrobust implementations.
Learning the Hamiltonian of a many-body system from its dynamics is a central task in quantum science, yet the algorithms with the strongest provable guarantees assume some level of quantum control--fast, arbitrary single-qubit gates interleaved with time evolution, and measurements in arbitrary bases--that is beyond the capabilities of near-term analog quantum simulators. Motivated by analog atom- and ion-based platforms, we study Hamiltonian learning under minimal access models.
Uniform state preparation and measurements: We first consider the setting where in every experiment, one can rotate each qubit to the same state, perform short-time evolution, and measure every qubit in the same basis. Surprisingly, we show that for generic 2-local Hamiltonians on any interaction graph, all of the parameters can be reconstructed from such experiments.
Computational basis state preparation and measurements: We then consider a similarly constrained setting, but where state preparation and measurement are restricted to the computational basis. For nearest-neighbor Hamiltonians with only Pauli X/Z interactions, a class which captures contemporary Rydberg atom platforms, we show that over 1D and 2D rectangular lattices, all of the parameters can be reconstructed from such experiments up to unavoidable gauges.
Our protocols introduce new techniques for solving structured polynomial systems over an extensive number of parameters. Taken together, our results suggest that one can learn a great deal from the dynamics of quantum many-body systems even under the most stringent experimental constraints.