Learning interacting fermionic Hamiltonians at the Heisenberg limit

Abstract

Efficiently learning an unknown Hamiltonian given access to its dynamics is a problem of interest for quantum metrology, many-body physics and machine learning. A fundamental question is whether learning can be performed at the Heisenberg limit, where the Hamiltonian evolution time scales inversely with the error, $\varepsilon$, in the reconstructed parameters. The Heisenberg limit has previously been shown to be achievable for certain classes of qubit and bosonic Hamiltonians. Most recently, a Heisenberg-limited learning algorithm was proposed for a simplified class of fermionic Hubbard Hamiltonians restricted to real hopping amplitudes and zero chemical potential at all sites, along with on-site interactions. In this work, we provide an algorithm to learn a more general class of fermionic Hubbard Hamiltonians at the Heisenberg limit, allowing complex hopping amplitudes and nonzero chemical potentials in addition to the on-site interactions, thereby including several models of physical interest. The required evolution time across all experiments in our protocol is $\mathcal{O}(1/\varepsilon)$ and the number of experiments required to learn all the Hamiltonian parameters is $\mathcal{O}(\text{polylog}(1/\varepsilon))$, independent of system size as long as each fermionic mode interacts with $\mathcal{O}(1)$ other modes. Unlike prior algorithms for bosonic and fermionic Hamiltonians, to obey fermionic parity superselection constraints in our more general setting, our protocol utilizes $\mathcal{O}(N)$ ancillary fermionic modes, where $N$ is the system size. Each experiment involves preparing fermionic Gaussian states, interleaving time evolution with fermionic linear optics unitaries, and performing local occupation number measurements on the fermionic modes. The protocol is robust to a constant amount of state preparation and measurement error.