Efficient Verification of Ground States of Frustration-Free Hamiltonians

Abstract

Ground states of local Hamiltonians are of key interest in many-body physics and also in quantum information processing. Efficient verification of these states are crucial to many applications, but very challenging. Here we propose a simple, but powerful recipe for verifying the ground states of general frustration-free Hamiltonians based on local measurements. Moreover, we derive rigorous bounds on the sample complexity by virtue of the quantum detectability lemma (with improvement) and quantum union bound. Notably, the number of samples required does not increase with the system size when the underlying Hamiltonian is local and gapped, which is the case of most interest. As an application, we propose a general approach for verifying Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki (AKLT) states on arbitrary graphs based on local spin measurements, which requires only a constant number of samples for AKLT states defined on various lattices. Our work is of interest not only to many tasks in quantum information processing, but also to the study of many-body physics.