Published April 17, 2025 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Local Hamiltonian Problem with Succinct Ground State is MA-Complete

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Finding the ground energy of a quantum system is a fundamental problem in condensed-matter physics and quantum chemistry. Existing classical algorithms for tackling this problem often assume that the ground state has a succinct classical description, i.e., a poly-size classical circuit for computing the amplitude. Notable examples of succinct states encompass matrix product states, contractible projected-entangled-pair states, and states that can be represented by classical neural networks. We study the complexity of the local Hamiltonian problem (LHP) with a succinct ground state. We prove that this problem is MA-complete. The Hamiltonian that we consider is general and might not be stoquastic. The MA verification protocol is based on the fixed-node quantum Monte Carlo method, particularly the variant of the continuous-time Markov chain introduced by Bravyi, Carleo, Gosset, and Liu. Based on our work, we also introduce a notion of strong guided states and conjecture that the LHP with a strong guided state is MA-complete, which will be in contrast with the QCMA-complete result of the LHP with standard guided states.

Copyright and License

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We thank Jiayu Zhang, Thomas Vidick, Urmila Mahadev, Sevag Gharibian, Yupan Liu, and Jielun Chen (Chris) for their helpful discussions. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions for presentations and open questions. J.J. is supported by Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Grant No. FA9550-18-1-0161 and the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM), a National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics Frontiers Center (NSF Grant No. PHY-1125565).

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Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2309.10155 (arXiv)

Funding

United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research
FA9550-18-1-0161
Institute for Quantum Information and Matter
National Science Foundation
PHY-1125565

Dates

Accepted
2025-03-18

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, Division of Engineering and Applied Science (EAS)
Publication Status
Published