Geometric speed limit of state preparation and curved control spaces

Abstract: The preparation of quantum many-body systems faces the difficulty that in a realistic scenario only few control parameters of the system may be accessible. In this context, an interesting connection between the energy fluctuations during state preparation and its geometric length as measured by the Fubini-Study metric was discussed in Bukov et al., "Geometric Speed Limit of Accessible Many-Body State Preparation", Phys. Rev. X 9, 011034 (2019). An inspiring conjecture was put forward lower bounding the energy fluctuations by the minimal geometric length of all accessible state preparation protocols. We here show that the conjecture holds if the accessible parameter space has no extrinsic curvature, when embedded into the space of all dynamically accessible states. If the parameter space has extrinsic curvature a weakened version of the conjecture applies. We discuss instructive examples for a qubit system and harmonic oscillators.