Preparing ground states of quantum many-body systems on a quantum computer
Abstract
The simulation of quantum many-body systems is a notoriously hard problem in condensed matter physics, but it could easily be handled by a quantum computer [4,1]. There is however one catch: while a quantum computer can naturally implement the dynamics of a quantum system --- i.e. solve Schr"odinger's equation --- there was until now no general method to initialize the computer in a low-energy state of the simulated system. We present a quantum algorithm [5] that can prepare the ground state and thermal states of a quantum many-body system in a time proportional to the square-root of its Hilbert space dimension. This is the same scaling as required by the best known algorithm to prepare the ground state of a classical many-body system on a quantum computer [3,2]. This provides strong evidence that for a quantum computer, preparing the ground state of a quantum system is in the worst case no more difficult than preparing the ground state of a classical system. 1 D. Aharonov and A. Ta-Shma, Adiabatic quantum state generation and statistical zero knowledge, Proc. 35th Annual ACM Symp. on Theo. Comp., (2003), p. 20. F. Barahona, On the computational complexity of ising spin glass models, J. Phys. A. Math. Gen., 15 (1982), p. 3241. C. H. Bennett, E. Bernstein, G. Brassard, and U. Vazirani, Strengths and weaknessess of quantum computing, SIAM J. Comput., 26 (1997), pp. 1510--1523, quant-ph/9701001. S. Lloyd, Universal quantum simulators, Science, 273 (1996), pp. 1073--1078. D. Poulin and P. Wocjan, Preparing ground states of quantum many-body systems on a quantum computer, 2008, arXiv:0809.2705.
- Publication:
-
APS March Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- March 2009
- Bibcode:
- 2009APS..MAR.A8001P