Physics inspired quantum simulation of resonating valence bond states -- a prototypical template for a spin-liquid ground state

TL;DR

This paper presents a quantum simulation approach inspired by physics to model spin-liquid ground states in Kagome anti-ferromagnets, demonstrating accurate results on real quantum hardware with scalable methods.

Contribution

It introduces a modular, gate-efficient ansatz for simulating spin-liquid states, leveraging classical and quantum techniques to achieve high accuracy on IBMQ devices.

Findings

Achieved <1% energy accuracy on real quantum hardware.

Demonstrated linear scaling of the protocol with system size.

Extended the approach to larger Kagome lattices.

Abstract

Spin-liquids -- an emergent, exotic collective phase of matter -- have garnered enormous attention in recent years. While experimentally, many prospective candidates have been proposed and realized, theoretically modeling real materials that display such behavior may pose serious challenges due to the inherently high correlation content of emergent phases. Over the last few decades, the second-quantum revolution has been the harbinger of a novel computational paradigm capable of initiating a foundational evolution in computational physics. In this report, we strive to use the power of the latter to study a prototypical model -- a spin-$\frac{1}{2}$-unit cell of a Kagome anti-ferromagnet. Extended lattices of such unit cells are known to possess a magnetically disordered spin-liquid ground state. We employ robust classical numerical techniques like Density-Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) to identify the nature of the ground state through a matrix-product state (MPS) formulation. We subsequently use the gained insight to construct an auxillary hamiltonian with reduced measurables and also design an ansatz that is modular and gate efficient. With robust error-mitigation strategies, we are able to demonstrate that the said ansatz is capable of accurately representing the target ground state even on a real IBMQ backend within $1\%$ accuracy in energy. Since the protocol is linearly scaling $O(n)$ in the number of unit cells, gate requirements, and the number of measurements, it is straightforwardly extendable to larger Kagome lattices which can pave the way for efficient construction of spin-liquid ground states on a quantum device.