The Lindblad master equation is a fundamental tool for describing the evolution of open quantum systems, but its computational complexity poses a significant challenge, especially for large systems. This article introduces a stochastic representation of the Lindblad dissipator that addresses this challenge by bundling the Lindblad operators. The stochastic dissipator maintains the Lindblad form, ensuring completely positive and trace-preserving dynamics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method by considering a Morse oscillator coupled to a spin bath. Our numerical experiments show that a small number of stochastically bundled operators can accurately capture the system's dynamics, even when the Hilbert space dimension is large. This method offers a new perspective on open quantum systems and provides a computationally efficient way to simulate their dynamics.
The Lindblad master equation is a fundamental tool for describing the evolution of open quantum systems, but its computational complexity poses a significant challenge, especially for large systems. This article introduces a stochastic representation of the Lindblad dissipator that addresses this challenge by bundling the Lindblad operators. The stochastic dissipator maintains the Lindblad form, ensuring completely positive and trace-preserving dynamics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method by considering a Morse oscillator coupled to a spin bath. Our numerical experiments show that a small number of stochastically bundled operators can accurately capture the system's dynamics, even when the Hilbert space dimension is large. This method offers a new perspective on open quantum systems and provides a computationally efficient way to simulate their dynamics.
We develop a Markovian master equation in the Lindblad form that enables the efficient study of a wide range of open quantum many-body systems that would be inaccessible with existing methods. The validity of the master equation is based entirely on properties of the bath and the system-bath coupling, without any requirements on the level structure within the system itself. The master equation is derived using a Markov approximation that is distinct from that used in earlier approaches. We provide a rigorous bound for the error induced by this Markov approximation; the error is controlled by a dimensionless combination of intrinsic correlation and relaxation timescales of the bath. Our master equation is accurate on the same level of approximation as the Bloch-Redfield equation. In contrast to the Bloch-Redfield approach, our approach ensures preservation of the positivity of the density matrix. As a result, our method is robust, and can be solved efficiently using stochastic evolution of pure states (rather than density matrices). We discuss how our method can be applied to static or driven quantum many-body systems, and illustrate its power through numerical simulation of a spin chain that would be challenging to treat by existing methods.
For the efficient simulation of open quantum systems, we often use quantum jump trajectories given by pure states that evolve stochastically to unravel the dynamics of the underlying master equation. In the Markovian regime, when the dynamics is described by a Gorini-Kossakowski-Sudarshan-Lindblad (GKSL) master equation, this procedure is known as Monte Carlo wave function approach. However, beyond ultraweak system-bath coupling, the dynamics of the system is not described by an equation of GKSL type, but rather by the Redfield equation, which can be brought into pseudo-Lindblad form. Here, negative dissipation strengths prohibit the conventional approach. To overcome this problem, we propose a pseudo-Lindblad quantum trajectory (PLQT) unraveling. It does not require an effective extension of the state space, like other approaches, except for the addition of a single classical bit. We test the PLQT for the eternal non-Markovian master equation for a single qubit and an interacting Fermi-Hubbard chain coupled to a thermal bath and discuss its computational effort compared to solving the full master equation.
Since precisely controlling dissipation in realistic environments is challenging, digital simulation of the Lindblad master equation (LME) is of great significance for understanding nonequilibrium dynamics in open quantum systems. However, achieving long-time simulations for complex systems with multiple dissipation channels remains a major challenge, both theoretically and experimentally. Here, we propose a 1-dilation digital scheme for simulating the LME based on quantum trajectory averaging without postselection. By rigorously matching the stochasticity inherent in quantum trajectories with the probabilistic outcomes of quantum measurements, our method effectively translates the classically established quantum jump algorithm into executable quantum circuits. A key advantage of our method is that it overcomes the exponential suppression of success probability seen in some existing postselection-dependent schemes, especially for long-time evolution or systems with numerous jump operators. Moreover, the scheme can be extended to a 2-dilation framework for the nonlinear LME with postselection, bridging the full LME and non-Hermitian Hamiltonian dynamics. This extended scheme provides a digital approach for exploring the interplay between non-Hermitian Hamiltonians and dissipative terms within a monitored quantum dynamics framework.
The Markovian dynamics of open quantum many-body systems are typically governed by the Lindblad master equation, yet obtaining the reduced density matrix for bosonic and fermionic systems remains a formidable numerical challenge due to the exponential growth of the Hilbert space. Here, we introduce a computationally efficient framework for constructing the reduced density matrix by modeling the environment as a copy of the primary system with a monotonically decaying coupling that enforces unidirectional energy flow. Our method directly yields exact solutions that rigorously satisfy the Lindblad master equation for both bosonic and fermionic cases, bypassing the need for costly Liouvillian diagonalization. We validate our approach through applications to paradigmatic models, demonstrating accurate reproduction of dissipative dynamics across a broad parameter regime. This work provides a straightforward and powerful tool for simulating Markovian open-system evolution, with immediate applicability to quantum transport and control problems in many-body physics.
We present an efficient algorithm for simulating open quantum systems dynamics described by the Lindblad master equation on quantum computers, addressing key challenges in the field. In contrast to existing approaches, our method achieves two significant advancements. First, we employ a repetition of unitary gates on a set of n system qubits and, remarkably, only a single ancillary bath qubit representing the environment. It follows that, for the typical case of m locality of the Lindblad operators, we reach an exponential improvement of the number of ancilla in terms of m and up to a polynomial improvement in ancilla overhead for large n with respect to other approaches. Although stochasticity is introduced, requiring multiple circuit realizations, the sampling overhead is independent of the system size. Second, we show that, under fixed accuracy conditions, our algorithm enables a reduction in the number of Trotter steps compared to other approaches, substantially decreasing circuit depth. These advancements hold particular significance for near-term quantum computers, where minimizing both width and depth is critical due to inherent noise in their dynamics. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
A finite-dimensional quantum system is coupled to a bath of oscillators in thermal equilibrium at temperature T>0 . We show that for fixed, small values of the coupling constant λ , the true reduced dynamics of the system is approximated by the completely positive, trace preserving Markovian semigroup generated by the Davies-Lindblad generator. The difference between the true and the Markovian dynamics is O(|λ|1/4) for all times, meaning that the solution of the Gorini-Kossakowski-Sudarshan-Lindblad master equation is approximating the true dynamics to accuracy O(|λ|1/4) for all times. Our method is based on a recently obtained expansion of the full system-bath propagator. It applies to reservoirs with correlation functions decaying in time as 1/t4 or faster, which is a significant improvement relative to the previously required exponential decay.