Near-Optimal Learning of Quantum Many-Body Systems from Gibbs and Thermal Metastable States via the Stationarity Test

Abstract

We study the problem of learning a finite-range quantum Hamiltonian on an $n$-qubit $D$-dimensional lattice from copies of its Gibbs states at a known inverse temperature $β$ or its thermal metastable states. Existing efficient algorithms at arbitrary temperature have sample guarantees with an $e^{\poly(β)}$ dependence, leaving open whether the exponent can be made linear in $β$. We achieve this improvement: for $β\ge1$, our algorithm learns all Hamiltonian coefficients to $\ell_\infty$-error $ε$ with probability at least $1-δ$ using $\tO\bigl(e^{O(β)}ε^{-2}\log(n/δ)\bigr)$ copies and total time $\tO\bigl(n e^{O(β)}ε^{-2}\log(n/δ)\bigr)$. The measurements act on individual copies and are supported on balls of radius $O\bigl(β^2+β\log(1/ε)\bigr)$. Our sample complexity achieves the optimal exponential order in $β$, with optimal $ε^{-2}$ dependence up to logarithmic factors. Building on the stationarity-test framework \citep{Bergamaschi2026Stationarity}, we prove a unified Fisher-information coercivity bound showing that errors in the candidate Hamiltonian produce a detectable signal with only an $e^{-O(β)}$ loss in sensitivity. The key is a smooth frequency filter whose bandwidth remains independent of temperature, together with sharper estimates relating this signal to the Hamiltonian coefficients. For thermal metastable states, the guarantee holds under local drift $ζ\le e^{-Cβ^{2D+1}}$, for a geometry-dependent constant $C>0$, and above an accuracy floor $\tO(e^{O(β)}ζ)$. The argument applies to both Gibbs and thermal metastable states and, combined with local measurements and projected stochastic gradient descent (SGD), yields both learning guarantees.