Learning State Preparation Circuits for Quantum Phases of Matter

Abstract: Many-body ground state preparation is an important subroutine used in the simulation of physical systems. In this paper, we introduce a flexible and efficient framework for obtaining a state preparation circuit for a large class of many-body ground states. We introduce polynomial-time classical algorithms that take reduced density matrices over $\mathcal{O}(1)$-sized balls as inputs, and output a circuit that prepares the global state. We introduce algorithms applicable to (i) short-range entangled states (e.g., states prepared by shallow quantum circuits in any number of dimensions, and more generally, invertible states) and (ii) long-range entangled ground states (e.g., the toric code on a disk). Both algorithms can provably find a circuit whose depth is asymptotically optimal. Our approach uses a variant of the quantum Markov chain condition that remains robust against constant-depth circuits. The robustness of this condition makes our method applicable to a large class of states, whilst ensuring a classically tractable optimization landscape.