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Quantum Information and Computation

The local Hamiltonian problem on a line with eight staes is QMA-complete

Sean Hallgren, Daniel Nagaj, S. Narayanaswami

Published Sep 1, 2013• 39 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The Local Hamiltonian problem is the problem of estimating the least eigenvalue of a local Hamiltonian, and is complete for the class QMA. The 1D problem on a chain of qubits has heuristics which work well, while the 13-state qudit case has been shown to be QMA-complete. We show that this problem remains QMA-complete when the dimensionality of the qudits is brought down to 8.

DOI
10.26421/qic13.9-10-1

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The Local Hamiltonian problem is the problem of estimating the least eigenvalue of a local Hamiltonian, and is complete for the class QMA. The 1D problem on a chain of qubits has heuristics which work well, while the 13-state qudit case has been shown to be QMA-complete. We show that this problem remains QMA-complete when the dimensionality of the qudits is brought down to 8.
The QMA-completeness of the local Hamiltonian problem is a landmark result of the field of Hamiltonian complexity that studies the computational complexity of problems in quantum many-body physics. Since its proposal, substantial effort has been invested in better understanding the problem for physically motivated important families of Hamiltonians. In particular, the QMA-completeness of approximating the ground state energy of local Hamiltonians has been extended to the case where the Hamiltonians are geometrically local in one and two spatial dimensions. Among those physically motivated Hamiltonians, stoquastic Hamiltonians play a particularly crucial role, as they constitute the manifestly sign-free Hamiltonians in Monte Carlo approaches. Interestingly, for such Hamiltonians, the problem at hand becomes more ''classical'', being hard for the class MA (the randomized version of NP) and its complexity has tight connections with derandomization. In this work, we prove that both the two- and one-dimensional geometrically local analogues remain MA-hard with high enough qudit dimension. Moreover, we show that related problems are StoqMA-complete.
Computing ground states of local Hamiltonians is a fundamental problem in condensed matter physics. The problem is known to be QMA-complete, even for one-dimensional Hamiltonians [1]. This means that we do not even expect that there is a sub-exponential size description of the ground state that allows efficient computation of local observables such as the energy. In sharp contrast, the heuristic density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) algorithm invented two decades ago [5] has been remarkably successful in practice on one-dimensional problems. The situation is reminiscent of the unexplained success of the simplex algorithm before the advent of ellipsoid and interior-point methods. Is there a principled explanation for this, in the form of a large class of one-dimensional Hamiltonians whose ground states can be provably efficiently approximated? Here we give such an algorithm for gapped one-dimensional Hamiltonians: our algorithm outputs an (inverse-polynomial) approximation to the ground state, expressed as a matrix product state (MPS) of polynomial bond dimension. The running time of the algorithm is polynomial in the number of qudits n and the approximation quality δ, for a fixed local dimension d and gap Δ > 0.
The Local Hamiltonian problem (finding the ground state energy of a quantum system) is known to be QMA-complete. The Local Consistency problem (deciding whether descriptions of small pieces of a quantum system are consistent) is also known to be QMA-complete. Here we consider special cases of Local Hamiltonian, for ``stoquastic'' and 1-dimensional systems, that seem to be strictly easier than QMA. We show that there exist analogous special cases of Local Consistency, that have equivalent complexity (up to poly-time oracle reductions). Our main technical tool is a new reduction from Local Consistency to Local Hamiltonian, using SDP duality.
Estimation of the minimum eigenvalue of a quantum Hamiltonian can be formalised as the Local Hamiltonian problem. We study the natural special case of the Local Hamiltonian problem where the same 2-local interaction, with differing weights, is applied across each pair of qubits. First we consider antiferromagnetic/ferromagnetic interactions, where the weights of the terms in the Hamiltonian are restricted to all be of the same sign. We show that for symmetric 2-local interactions with no 1-local part, the problem is either QMA-complete or in StoqMA. In particular the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg and antiferromagnetic XY interactions are shown to be QMA-complete. We also prove StoqMA-completeness of the antiferromagnetic transverse field Ising model. Second, we study the Local Hamiltonian problem under the restriction that the interaction terms can only be chosen to lie on a particular graph. We prove that nearly all of the QMA-complete 2-local interactions remain QMA-complete when restricted to a 2D square lattice. Finally we consider both restrictions at the same time and discover that, with the exception of the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg interaction, all of the interactions which are QMA-complete with positive coefficients remain QMA-complete when restricted to a 2D triangular lattice.