A fast algorithm for approximating the ground state energy on a quantum computer

Abstract

Estimating the ground state energy of a multiparticle system with relative error $\e$ using deterministic classical algorithms has cost that grows exponentially with the number of particles. The problem depends on a number of state variables $d$ that is proportional to the number of particles and suffers from the curse of dimensionality. Quantum computers can vanquish this curse. In particular, we study a ground state eigenvalue problem and exhibit a quantum algorithm that achieves relative error $\e$ using a number of qubits $C^\prime d\log \e^{-1}$ with total cost (number of queries plus other quantum operations) $Cd\e^{-(3+\delta)}$, where $\delta>0$ is arbitrarily small and $C$ and $C^\prime$ are independent of $d$ and $\e$.