Energy-filtered random-phase states as microcanonical thermal pure quantum states

Abstract

We propose a method to calculate finite-temperature properties of a quantum many-body system for a microcanonical ensemble by introducing a pure quantum state named here an energy-filtered random-phase state, which is also a potentially promising application of near-term quantum computers. In our formalism, a microcanonical ensemble is specified by two parameters, i.e., the energy of the system and its associated energy window. Accordingly, the density of states is expressed as a sum of Gaussians centered at the target energy with its spread corresponding to the width of the energy window. We then show that the thermodynamic quantities such as entropy and temperature are calculated by evaluating the trace of the time-evolution operator and the trace of the time-evolution operator multiplied by the Hamiltonian of the system. We also describe how these traces can be evaluated using random diagonal-unitary circuits appropriate to quantum computation. The pure quantum state representing our microcanonical ensemble is related to a state of the form introduced by Wall and Neuhauser for the filter diagonalization method [M. R. Wall and D. Neuhauser, J. Chem. Phys. 102, 8011 (1995)], and therefore we refer to it as an energy-filtered random-phase state. The energy-filtered random-phase state is essentially a Fourier transform of a time-evolved state whose initial state is prepared as a random-phase state, and the cut-off time in the time-integral for the Fourier transform sets the inverse of the width of the energy window. The proposed method is demonstrated numerically by calculating thermodynamic quantities for the one-dimensional spin-1/2 Heisenberg model on small clusters up to 28 qubits, showing that the method is most efficient for the target energy around which the dense distribution of energy eigenstates is found.