Simple quantum algorithm to efficiently prepare sparse states

State preparation is a fundamental routine in quantum computation, for which many algorithms have been proposed. Among them, perhaps the simplest one is the Grover-Rudolph algorithm. In this paper we analyze the performance of this algorithm when the state to prepare is sparse. We show that the gate complexity is linear in the number of nonzero amplitudes in the state and quadratic in the number of qubits. We then introduce a simple modification of the algorithm, which makes the dependence on the number of qubits also linear. This is competitive with the best known algorithms for sparse state preparation.