Building all Time Evolutions with Rotationally Invariant Hamiltonians

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how any unitary evolution and measurement can be realized using rotationally invariant Hamiltonians by employing ancillary reference frames, addressing the challenge of symmetry constraints in quantum systems.

Contribution

It introduces two schemes for implementing arbitrary quantum operations with rotationally invariant Hamiltonians using ancillary reference frames, and analyzes the effects of quantum fluctuations.

Findings

Any unitary can be approximated with rotationally invariant Hamiltonians.

Quantum fluctuations decrease as the size of the reference frame increases.

Symmetric quantum operations can be implemented using symmetric interactions and ancillas.

Abstract

All elementary Hamiltonians in nature are expected to be invariant under rotation. Despite this restriction, we usually assume that any arbitrary measurement or unitary time evolution can be implemented on a physical system, an assumption whose validity is not obvious. We introduce two different schemes by which any arbitrary unitary time evolution and measurement can be implemented with desired accuracy by using rotationally invariant Hamiltonians that act on the given system and two ancillary systems serving as reference frames. These frames specify the z and x directions and are independent of the desired time evolution. We also investigate the effects of quantum fluctuations that inevitably arise due to usage of a finite system as a reference frame and estimate how fast these fluctuations tend to zero when the size of the reference frame tends to infinity. Moreover we prove that for a general symmetry any symmetric quantum operations can be implemented just by using symmetric interactions and ancillas in the symmetric states.