In the problem of ground-state energy estimation, one aims to estimate the smallest eigenvalue of a Hamiltonian, often given a guiding state, with some promised overlap
γ with the ground space. The main approach to this problem is to simulate its evolution, and estimate the smallest (or equivalently, largest) eigenphase of the resulting unitary
U. We give a quantum algorithm that estimates the largest eigenphase of a unitary
U in this guided setting using a factor of
logγ1 fewer queries to
U than the previous best approach. The result matches an existing lower bound, and answers an open question from Mande and de Wolf. The algorithm is based on transducers, which often allow composition of quantum algorithms without overhead from error reduction.