Improved scaling of time-evolving block-decimation algorithm through reduced-rank randomized singular value decomposition

When the amount of entanglement in a quantum system is limited, the relevant dynamics of the system is restricted to a very small part of the state space. When restricted to this subspace the description of the system becomes efficient in the system size. A class of algorithms, exemplified by the time-evolving block-decimation (TEBD) algorithm, make use of this observation by selecting the relevant subspace through a decimation technique relying on the singular value decomposition (SVD). In these algorithms, the complexity of each time-evolution step is dominated by the SVD. Here we show that, by applying a randomized version of the SVD routine (RRSVD), the power law governing the computational complexity of TEBD is lowered by one degree, resulting in a considerable speed-up. We exemplify the potential gains in efficiency at the hand of some real world examples to which TEBD can be successfully applied and demonstrate that for those systems RRSVD delivers results as accurate as state-of-the-art deterministic SVD routines.