Warm Starts, Cold States: Exploiting Adiabaticity for Variational Ground-States
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2602.06137 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 5 Feb 2026] Title:Warm Starts, Cold States: Exploiting Adiabaticity for Variational Ground-States Authors:Ricard Puig, Berta Casas, Alba Cervera-Lierta, Zoë Holmes, Adrián Pérez-Salinas View a PDF of the paper titled Warm Starts, Cold States: Exploiting Adiabaticity for Variational Ground-States, by Ricard Puig and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Reliable preparation of many-body ground states is an essential task in quantum computing, with applications spanning areas from chemistry and materials modeling to quantum optimization and benchmarking. A variety of approaches have been proposed to tackle this problem, including variational methods. However, variational training often struggle to navigate complex energy landscapes, frequently encountering suboptimal local minima or suffering from barren plateaus. In this work, we introduce an iterative strategy for ground-state preparation based on a stepwise (discretized) Hamiltonian deformation. By complementing the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) with adiabatic principles, we demonstrate that solving a sequence of intermediate problems facilitates tracking the ground-state manifold toward the target system, even as we scale the system size. We provide a rigorous theoretical foundation for this approach, proving a lower bound on the loss variance that suggests trainability throughout the deformation, provided the system remains away from gap closings. Numerical simulations, including the effects of shot noise, confirm that this path-dependent tracking consistently converges to the target ground state. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML) Cite as: arXiv:2602.06137 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2602.06137v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.06137 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Ricard Puig [view email] [v1] Thu, 5 Feb 2026 19:13:11 UTC (1,260 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Warm Starts, Cold States: Exploiting Adiabaticity for Variational Ground-States, by Ricard Puig and 4 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-02 Change to browse by: cs cs.LG stat stat.ML References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)