Zhong-Xia Shang, Dong An, Changpeng Shao (Sep 12 2025).

Abstract: We investigate Lindbladian fast-forwarding and its applications to estimating Gibbs state properties. Fast-forwarding refers to the ability to simulate a system of time $t$ using significantly fewer than $t$ queries or circuit depth. While various Hamiltonian systems are known to circumvent the no fast-forwarding theorem, analogous results for dissipative dynamics, governed by Lindbladians, remain largely unexplored. We first present a quantum algorithm for simulating purely dissipative Lindbladians with unitary jump operators, achieving additive query complexity $\mathcal{O}\left(t + \frac{\log(\varepsilon^{-1})}{\log\log(\varepsilon^{-1})}\right)$ up to error~$\varepsilon$, improving previous algorithms. When the jump operators have certain structures (i.e., block-diagonal Paulis), the algorithm can be modified to achieve exponential fast-forwarding, attaining circuit depth $\mathcal{O}\left(\log\left(t + \frac{\log(\varepsilon^{-1})}{\log\log(\varepsilon^{-1})}\right)\right)$, while preserving query complexity. Using these fast-forwarding techniques, we develop a quantum algorithm for estimating Gibbs state properties of the form $\langle \psi_1 | e^{-\beta(H + I)} | \psi_2 \rangle$, up to additive error $\epsilon$, with $H$ the Hamiltonian and $\beta$ the inverse temperature. For input states exhibiting certain coherence conditions -- e.g.,~$\langle 0|^{\otimes n} e^{-\beta(H + I)} |+\rangle^{\otimes n}$ -- our method achieves exponential improvement in complexity (measured by circuit depth), $\mathcal{O} (2^{-n/2} \epsilon^{-1} \log \beta ),$ compared to the quantum singular value transformation-based approach, with complexity $\tilde{\mathcal{O}} (\epsilon^{-1} \sqrt{\beta} )$. For general $| \psi_1 \rangle$ and $| \psi_2 \rangle$, we also show how the level of improvement is changed with the coherence resource in $| \psi_1 \rangle$ and $| \psi_2 \rangle$.

Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09517