English

Time evolution of impurity models and their universality for quantum computation

Quantum Physics 2026-04-10 v1

Abstract

Impurity Hamiltonians are systems of NN fermionic modes where O(1)O(1) of them interact among themselves via quartic (or higher order) fermion terms, while coupling quadratically with O(N)O(N) bath modes. Without the quartic interactions, these systems are classically simulable with O(N3)O(N^3) resources. It was proved that the time-dependent evolution of these systems can perform universal quantum computation. The question of whether or not this remains true for time-independent evolution remains open. Here, we prove that the time evolution of generic time-independent impurity Hamiltonians on O(N)O(N) qubits is universal on NN qubits if the input state is a product state of fermions in any single particle basis. In our proof we find that for a computation of depth SS, the size of the impurity scales as O(SlogS)O(S\log S).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.08466,
  title  = {Time evolution of impurity models and their universality for quantum computation},
  author = {N. C. Mai Pham and Raul A. Santos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.08466},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

14 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:01:34.054Z