Quantum system compression: A Hamiltonian guided walk through Hilbert space

Abstract

We present a systematic study of quantum system compression for the evolution of generic many-body problems. The necessary numerical simulations of such systems are seriously hindered by the exponential growth of the Hilbert space dimension with the number of particles. For a \emph{constant} Hamiltonian system of Hilbert space dimension $n$ whose frequencies range from $f_{\min}$ to $f_{\max}$, we show via a proper orthogonal decomposition, that for a run-time $T$, the dominant dynamics are compressed in the neighborhood of a subspace whose dimension is the smallest integer larger than the time-bandwidth product $\delf=(f_{\max}-f_{\min})T$. We also show how the distribution of initial states can further compress the system dimension. Under the stated conditions, the time-bandwidth estimate reveals the \emph{existence} of an effective compressed model whose dimension is derived solely from system properties and not dependent on the particular implementation of a variational simulator, such as a machine learning system, or quantum device. However, finding an efficient solution procedure \emph{is} dependent on the simulator implementation{\color{black}, which is not discussed in this paper}. In addition, we show that the compression rendered by the proper orthogonal decomposition encoding method can be further strengthened via a multi-layer autoencoder. Finally, we present numerical illustrations to affirm the compression behavior in time-varying Hamiltonian dynamics in the presence of external fields. We also discuss the potential implications of the findings for machine learning tools to efficiently solve the many-body or other high dimensional Schr{\"o}dinger equations.