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arXiv:2609.27181

Emergent Prethermal Symmetries for Scalable Hamiltonian Learning

Myeongjin Shin, Junseo Lee, Iman Marvian, Yu Tong

quant-phmath-phSubmitted Sep 23, 2026• Announced Sep 24, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Learning an interacting many-body Hamiltonian at the Heisenberg limit generally requires control that preserves local information for evolution times of order $1/\varepsilon$ to attain $\varepsilon$ precision. To achieve this, existing protocols often rely on trusted many-qubit operations or increasingly rapid control pulses, creating a precision barrier when gates involve unknown multi-qubit interaction or have finite duration. We show that neither resource is necessary for geometrically local Hamiltonians. Our protocol applies only static single-qubit fields, whose strength is independent of system size and grows polylogarithmically with $1/\varepsilon$. These fields generate emergent prethermal symmetries that suppress thermalization for the entire learning experiment while retaining informative symmetry-preserving dynamics. On a $d$-dimensional lattice of $n$ qubits, this enables learning every coefficient to accuracy $\varepsilon$, with failure probability at most $δ$, using total evolution time $\mathcal{O}(\log^d(1/\varepsilon)\log^2(n/δ)/\varepsilon).$ Thus, our learning protocol attains the information-theoretically optimal \(1/\varepsilon\) dependence up to polylogarithmic factors using product-state preparation, single-qubit measurements, and non-adaptive experiments. More broadly, our results establish emergent prethermal symmetries as a resource for quantum learning, opening a route to Heisenberg-limited characterization of many-body systems where fast or trusted many-qubit control is unavailable.

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Learning an interacting many-body Hamiltonian at the Heisenberg limit generally requires control that preserves local information for evolution times of order 1/ε1/\varepsilon1/ε to attain ε\varepsilonε precision. To achieve this, existing protocols often rely on trusted many-qubit operations or increasingly rapid control pulses, creating a precision barrier when gates involve unknown multi-qubit interaction or have finite duration. We show that neither resource is necessary for geometrically local Hamiltonians. Our protocol applies only static single-qubit fields, whose strength is independent of system size and grows polylogarithmically with 1/ε1/\varepsilon1/ε. These fields generate emergent prethermal symmetries that suppress thermalization for the entire learning experiment while retaining informative symmetry-preserving dynamics. On a ddd-dimensional lattice of nnn qubits, this enables learning every coefficient to accuracy ε\varepsilonε, with failure probability at most δδδ, using total evolution time O(log⁡d(1/ε)log⁡2(n/δ)/ε).\mathcal{O}(\log^d(1/\varepsilon)\log^2(n/δ)/\varepsilon).O(logd(1/ε)log2(n/δ)/ε). Thus, our learning protocol attains the information-theoretically optimal (1/\varepsilon) dependence up to polylogarithmic factors using product-state preparation, single-qubit measurements, and non-adaptive experiments. More broadly, our results establish emergent prethermal symmetries as a resource for quantum learning, opening a route to Heisenberg-limited characterization of many-body systems where fast or trusted many-qubit control is unavailable.
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Characterizing quantum systems by learning their underlying Hamiltonians is a central task in quantum information science. While recent algorithmic advances have achieved near-optimal efficiency in this task, they critically rely on accessing arbitrarily short-time dynamics. This reliance poses severe experimental challenges due to finite control bandwidth and transient pulse errors. In this work, we demonstrate that Heisenberg-limited Hamiltonian learning can be achieved without short-time control. We introduce a framework in which every query to the unknown dynamics has duration at least a prescribed minimum time T , and show that this restriction does not preclude Heisenberg-limited scaling. The key ingredient is a method for emulating the continuous quantum control required by iterative learning algorithms using only such lower-bounded evolution times. This reduces the learning task to sparse pure-state tomography. Notably, for logarithmically sparse Hamiltonians, our algorithm achieves the information-theoretically optimal 1 / ε scaling in total evolution time for arbitrary constant minimum evolution time T . For many-body (polynomially sparse) systems, we uncover a rigorous quantitative tradeoff, showing that the minimum required evolution time can be significantly relaxed from the standard limit at a polynomial cost in total evolution time. Our results affirmatively resolve a prominent open problem in the field and reveal that high-bandwidth, ultra-short pulses are not fundamentally necessary for optimal quantum learning.
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We study the problem of learning local Lindbladians from black-box access to the physical evolution, where the goal is to estimate all Hamiltonian and dissipative coefficients. For local Lindbladians with low-intersection dissipators and local dynamical strength at most ΛΛΛ, we design an algorithm that learns the coefficients to target accuracy ε\varepsilonε, whose number of channel uses and total evolution time scale as O~(Λ2/ε2)\widetilde{O}(Λ^2/\varepsilon^2)O(Λ2/ε2) and O~(Λ/ε2)\widetilde{O}(Λ/\varepsilon^2)O(Λ/ε2), respectively, with only logarithmic dependence on the number of qubits. The algorithm is built directly from finite-time channel probes. It runs the unknown evolution for short times, estimates the corresponding Pauli transfer matrices from classical shadows, and converts these estimates into Lindbladian coefficients by stable local Fourier inversions. The algorithm is non-adaptive, uses no ancillas, and requires only random product states as inputs followed by random Pauli measurements. The method does not require knowing the structure of the Lindbladian in advance. We prove matching lower bounds that establish the near-optimality of the algorithm in both resources. By constructing a family of single-qubit dephasing Lindbladians, we show that any algorithm, even an adaptive one with arbitrary ancillas and measurements, requires Ω(Λ2/ε2)Ω(Λ^2/\varepsilon^2)Ω(Λ2/ε2) channel uses and Ω(Λ/ε2)Ω(Λ/\varepsilon^2)Ω(Λ/ε2) total evolution time. In particular, the lower bounds imply that the Heisenberg-limited scaling achievable for Hamiltonian learning is information-theoretically impossible once dissipative coefficients must be estimated.