Fast quantum computation with all-to-all Hamiltonians

Abstract

All-to-all interactions arise naturally in many areas of theoretical physics and across diverse experimental quantum platforms, motivating a systematic study of their information-processing power. Assuming each pair of qubits interacts with $\mathrm{O}(1)$ strength, time-dependent all-to-all Hamiltonians can simulate arbitrary all-to-all quantum circuits, performing quantum computation in time proportional to the circuit depth. We show that this naive correspondence is far from optimal: all-to-all Hamiltonians can process information on much shorter timescales. First, we prove that any two-qubit gate can be simulated by all-to-all Hamiltonians on $N$ qubits in time $\mathrm{O}(1/N)$ (up to factor $N^{\delta}$ with an arbitrarily small constant $\delta>0$), with polynomially small error $1/\mathrm{poly}(N)$. Immediate consequences include: 1) Certain $\mathrm{O}(N)$-qubit unitaries and entangled states, such as the multiply-controlled Toffoli gate and the GHZ and W states, can be generated in $\mathrm{O}(1/N)$ time; 2) Trading space for time, any quantum circuit can be simulated in arbitrarily short time; 3) Information could propagate in a fast way that saturates known Lieb-Robinson bounds in strongly power-law interacting systems. Our second main result proves that any depth-$D$ quantum circuit can be simulated by a randomized Hamiltonian protocol in time $T=\mathrm{O}(D/\sqrt{N})$, with constant space overhead and polynomially small error. The techniques underlying our results depart fundamentally from the existing literature on parallelizing commuting gates: We rely crucially on non-commuting Hamiltonians and draw on diverse physical ideas.