Scaling Theory for Learning Low-Energy Quantum Subspaces

Abstract

Phase diagrams and energy surfaces require low-energy states across a family of Hamiltonians, but solving each parameter point independently is prohibitively expensive. An important question is not how a single labeled eigenstate behaves under parameter variation, but how much information about the low-energy sector is contained in a small set of reference wavefunctions. We show that the physically relevant object is the isolated low-energy subspace itself: it remains well defined through degeneracies and level crossings, and it can be learned efficiently from nearby sampled states. Working in this subspace, we prove that a sampling pattern cancelling the first $q$ nonconstant response orders yields an energy-density error bounded by $d^{2(q+1)}$ for every retained level, where $d$ is the parameter-space sampling distance. For a gapped local ground state on $n$ sites, locality sharpens this to $d^2(nd^2)^q$, identifying $nd^2$ as the natural scaling variable governing the effectiveness of higher-order information from sampled wavefunctions. In a local analytic regime this gives a sampling cost $K=\mathcal{O}([\log(1/\varepsilon)]^D)$ at fixed parameter dimension $D$. Numerical results on Heisenberg and transverse-field Ising chains confirm the distance scaling law and the $nd^2$ collapse. Beyond characterizing learnability, the scaling behavior further provides a finite-size probe of phase transitions near criticality.