Locally accurate MPS approximations for ground states of one-dimensional gapped local Hamiltonians

Abstract

A key feature of ground states of gapped local 1D Hamiltonians is their relatively low entanglement --- they are well approximated by matrix product states (MPS) with bond dimension scaling polynomially in the length N of the chain, while general states require a bond dimension scaling exponentially. We show that the bond dimension of these MPS approximations can be improved to a constant, independent of the chain length, if we relax our notion of approximation to be more local: for all length-k segments of the chain, the reduced density matrices of our approximations are ϵ-close to those of the exact state. If the state is a ground state of a gapped local Hamiltonian, the bond dimension of the approximation scales like (k/ϵ)^(1+o(1)), and at the expense of worse but still poly(k,1/ϵ) scaling of the bond dimension, we give an alternate construction with the additional features that it can be generated by a constant-depth quantum circuit with nearest-neighbor gates, and that it applies generally for any state with exponentially decaying correlations. For a completely general state, we give an approximation with bond dimension exp(O(k/ϵ)), which is exponentially worse, but still independent of N. Then, we consider the prospect of designing an algorithm to find a local approximation for ground states of gapped local 1D Hamiltonians. When the Hamiltonian is translationally invariant, we show that the ability to find O(1)-accurate local approximations to the ground state in T(N) time implies the ability to estimate the ground state energy to O(1) precision in O(T(N)log(N)) time.