Preparing Ground States of Quantum Many-Body Systems on a Quantum Computer

Preparing the ground state of a system of interacting classical particles is an NP-hard problem. Thus, there is in general no better algorithm to solve this problem than exhaustively going through all N configurations of the system to determine the one with lowest energy, requiring a running time proportional to N. A quantum computer, if it could be built, could solve this problem in time N. Here, we present a powerful extension of this result to the case of interacting quantum particles, demonstrating that a quantum computer can prepare the ground state of a quantum system as efficiently as it does for classical systems.