Adiabatic ground-state preparation of fermionic many-body systems from a two-body perspective

A well-known method to prepare ground states of fermionic many-body hamiltonians is adiabatic state preparation, in which an easy to prepare state is time-evolved towards an approximate ground state under a specific time-dependent hamiltonian. However, which path to take in the evolution is often unclear, and a direct linear interpolation, which is the most common method, may not be optimal. In this work, we explore new types of adiabatic paths based on an eigendecomposition of the coefficient tensor in the second quantised representa- tion of the difference between the final and initial hamiltonian (the residual hamiltonian). Since there is an equivalence between this tensor and a projection of the residual hamiltonian onto the subspace of two particles, this approach is essentially a two-body spectral decomposition. We show how for general hamiltonians, the adiabatic time complexity may be upper bounded in terms of the number of one-body modes L and a minimal gap ∆ along the path. Our finding is that the complexity is determined primarily by the degree of pairing in the two-body states. As a result, systems whose two-body eigenstates are uniform superpositions of distinct fermion pairs tend to exhibit maximal complexity, which scales as O(L⁴/∆³) in direct interpolation and O(L⁶/∆³) in an evolution that follows a path along the corners of a hypercube in parameter space. The usefulness of our method is demonstrated through a few examples involving Fermi-Hubbard models where, due to symmetries, level crossings occur in direct interpolation. We show that our method of decomposing the residual hamiltonian and thereby deviating from a direct path appropriately breaks the relevant symmetries, thus avoiding level crossings and enabling an adiabatic passage.