Improved Hamiltonian learning and sparsity testing through Bell sampling

Abstract

We consider the problem of learning an $M$-sparse Hamiltonian and the related problem of Hamiltonian sparsity testing. Through a detailed analysis of Bell sampling, we reduce the total evolution time required by the state-of-the-art algorithm for $M$-sparse Hamiltonian learning to $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(M/\epsilon)$, where $\epsilon$ denotes the $\ell^{\infty}$ error, achieving an improvement by a factor of $M$ (ignoring the logarithmic factor) while only requiring access to forward time-evolution. We then establish a connection between Hamiltonian learning and Hamiltonian sparsity testing through Bell sampling, which enables us to propose a Hamiltonian sparsity testing with state-of-the-art total evolution time scaling.