Dividing and Conquering the Van Vleck Catastrophe

The quantum-computational cost of determining ground state energies through quantum phase estimation depends on the overlap between an easily preparable initial state and the targeted ground state. The Van Vleck orthogonality catastrophe has frequently been invoked to suggest that quantum computers may not be able to efficiently prepare ground states of large systems because the overlap with the initial state tends to decrease exponentially with the system size, even for non-interacting systems. We show that this intuition is not necessarily true. Specifically, we introduce a divide-and-conquer strategy that repeatedly uses phase estimation to merge ground states of increasingly larger subsystems. We provide rigorous bounds for this approach and show that if the minimum success probability of each merge is lower bounded by a constant, then the query complexity of preparing the ground state of $N$ interacting systems is in $O(N^{\log\log(N)} {\rm poly}(N))$, which is quasi-polynomial in $N$, in contrast to the exponential scaling anticipated by the Van Vleck catastrophe. We also discuss sufficient conditions on the Hamiltonian that ensure a quasi-polynomial running time.