Strongly Universal Hamiltonian Simulators

Abstract: A universal family of Hamiltonians can be used to simulate any local Hamiltonian by encoding its full spectrum as the low-energy subspace of a Hamiltonian from the family. Many spin-lattice model Hamiltonians -- such as Heisenberg or XY interaction on the 2D square lattice -- are known to be universal. However, the known encodings can be very inefficient, requiring interaction energy that scales exponentially with system size if the original Hamiltonian has higher-dimensional, long-range, or even all-to-all interactions. In this work, we provide an efficient construction by which these universal families are in fact "strongly" universal. This means that the required interaction energy and all other resources in the 2D simulator scale polynomially in the size of the target Hamiltonian and precision parameters, regardless of the target's connectivity. This exponential improvement over previous constructions is achieved by combining the tools of quantum phase estimation algorithm and circuit-to-Hamiltonian transformation in a non-perturbative way that only incurs polynomial overhead. The simulator Hamiltonian also possess certain translation-invariance. Furthermore, we show that even 1D Hamiltonians with nearest-neighbor interaction of 8-dimensional particles on a line are strongly universal Hamiltonian simulators, although without any translation-invariance. Our results establish that analog quantum simulations of general systems can be made efficient, greatly increasing their potential as applications for near-future quantum technologies.