Catalytic Tomography of Ground States

TL;DR

This paper presents a minimally invasive protocol for measuring properties of gapped ground states efficiently, with evolution time scaling optimally with the spectral gap and precision, reducing tomography overhead in quantum simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, disturbance-free tomography protocol that requires only local Hamiltonian evolution, enabling efficient reading of ground states from a single copy.

Findings

Evolution time scales inversely with spectral gap and precision

Protocol only requires local Hamiltonian evolution on a small patch

Reduces tomography overhead in quantum simulation tasks

Abstract

We introduce a simple protocol for measuring properties of a gapped ground state with essentially no disturbance to the state. The required Hamiltonian evolution time scales inversely with the spectral gap and target precision (up to logarithmic factors), which is optimal. For local observables on geometrically local systems, the protocol only requires Hamiltonian evolution on a quasi-local patch of inverse-gap radius. Our results show that gapped ground states are algorithmically readable from a single copy without a recovery or rewinding procedure, which may drastically reduce tomography overhead in certain quantum simulation tasks.