Fast Hamiltonian engineering from cut polytope geometry

Abstract:Hamiltonian engineering (HE) simulates quantum dynamics under a target Hamiltonian using a native entangling system Hamiltonian and restricted control, with applications from quantum gate design to analog quantum simulation. Observing that, for many systems, formulating HE as a linear program only requires specific commutation relations between the control pulses and the system Hamiltonian, we provide a unified framework for broad classes of $2$-local qubit, qudit, and fermionic systems. We reformulate time-optimal HE as a complex $k$-cut polytope problem, with $k$ the number of distinct phases in these commutation relations, and prove it NP-complete for every finite $k$. We therefore relax the polytope to the elliptope and apply a Krivine-type rounding, yielding pulses informed by the system and target Hamiltonians, which we then use in a linear program. We derive how many informed pulses are necessary and sufficient for the linear program to be reliably feasible. Additionally mixing in uniformly sampled pulses guarantees a solution close to the relaxation value from $\mathrm{O}(m)$ pulses, with $m$ the number of interaction terms. Together with upper and lower bounds on the optimal quantum run time, this yields an $\mathrm{O}(\sqrt{m})$ approximation ratio. In benchmarks on a fully connected Ising model, a chiral clock model for qudits, and the fermionic Harper-Hofstadter model, our approach attains near-optimal quantum run times wherever the optimum is computable, reaches run times that saturate with the lattice size in the fermionic case, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods with $\mathrm{O}(m)$ pulses. This establishes a unified approach with provable guarantees to the automatic programming of analog quantum simulators.

Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Quantum Gases (cond-mat.quant-gas)

arXiv:2609.36006 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2609.36006v1 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.36006 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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