  Answering whether quantum computers can efficiently simulate quantum field
theories has both theoretical and practical motivation. From the theoretical
point of view, it answers the question of whether a hypothetical computer that
utilizes quantum field theory would be more powerful than other quantum
computers. From the practical point of view, when reliable quantum computers
are eventually built, these algorithms can help us better understand the
underlying physics that govern our world.
  In the best known quantum algorithms for simulating quantum field theories,
the time scaling is dominated by initial state preparation. In this paper, we
exclusively focus on state preparation and present a heuristic algorithm that
can prepare the vacuum of fermionic systems in more general cases and more
efficiently than previous methods. With our method, state preparation is no
longer the bottleneck, as its runtime has the same asymptotic scaling with the
desired precision as the remainder of the simulation algorithm. We numerically
demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for the 1+1 dimensional
Gross-Neveu model.
