Simulating highly nonlocal Hamiltonians with less nonlocal Hamiltonians

Abstract

The need for Hamiltonians with many-body interactions arises in various applications of quantum computing. However, interactions beyond two-body are difficult to realize experimentally. Perturbative gadgets were introduced to obtain arbitrary many-body effective interactions using Hamiltonians with two-body interactions only. Although valid for arbitrary $k$-body interactions, their use is limited to small $k$ because the strength of interaction is $k$'th order in perturbation theory. In this paper we develop a nonperturbative technique for obtaining effective $k$-body interactions using Hamiltonians consisting of at most $l$-body interactions with $l<k$. This technique works best for Hamiltonians with a few interactions with very large $k$ and can be used together with perturbative gadgets to embed Hamiltonians of considerable complexity in proper subspaces of two-local Hamiltonians. We describe how our technique can be implemented in a hybrid (gate-based and adiabatic) as well as solely adiabatic quantum computing scheme.