Noise-resilient preparation of quantum many-body ground states

Abstract

Certain quantum many-body ground states can be prepared by a large-depth quantum circuit consisting of geometrically local gates. In the presence of noise, local expectation values deviate from the correct value at most by an amount comparable to the noise rate. This happens if the action of the noiseless circuit, restricted to certain subsystems, rapidly mixes local observables up to a small correction. The encoding circuit for the surface code is given as an example.