%0 Journal Article %J Phys. Rev. X 9, 031006 %D 2019 %T Locality and digital quantum simulation of power-law interactions %A Minh C. Tran %A Andrew Y. Guo %A Yuan Su %A James R. Garrison %A Zachary Eldredge %A Michael Foss-Feig %A Andrew M. Childs %A Alexey V. Gorshkov %X
The propagation of information in non-relativistic quantum systems obeys a speed limit known as a Lieb-Robinson bound. We derive a new Lieb-Robinson bound for systems with interactions that decay with distance r as a power law, 1/rα. The bound implies an effective light cone tighter than all previous bounds. Our approach is based on a technique for approximating the time evolution of a system, which was first introduced as part of a quantum simulation algorithm by Haah et al. [arXiv:1801.03922]. To bound the error of the approximation, we use a known Lieb-Robinson bound that is weaker than the bound we establish. This result brings the analysis full circle, suggesting a deep connection between Lieb-Robinson bounds and digital quantum simulation. In addition to the new Lieb-Robinson bound, our analysis also gives an error bound for the Haah et al. quantum simulation algorithm when used to simulate power-law decaying interactions. In particular, we show that the gate count of the algorithm scales with the system size better than existing algorithms when α>3D (where D is the number of dimensions).
%B Phys. Rev. X 9, 031006 %V 9 %8 07/10/2019 %G eng %U https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.05225 %N 031006 %R https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.9.031006