We propose a polynomial-time algorithm for preparing the Gibbs state of the two-dimensional toric code Hamiltonian at any temperature, starting from any initial condition, significantly improving upon prior estimates that suggested exponential scaling with inverse temperature. Our approach combines the Lindblad dynamics using a local Davies generator with simple global jump operators to enable efficient transitions between logical sectors. Our proof also shows that the Lindblad dynamics with a digitally implemented low-temperature local Davies generator is able to efficiently drive the quantum state towards the ground state manifold.
We propose a polynomial-time algorithm for preparing the Gibbs state of the two-dimensional toric code Hamiltonian at any temperature, starting from any initial condition, significantly improving upon prior estimates that suggested exponential scaling with inverse temperature. Our approach combines the Lindblad dynamics using a local Davies generator with simple global jump operators to enable efficient transitions between logical sectors. Our proof also shows that the Lindblad dynamics with a digitally implemented low-temperature local Davies generator is able to efficiently drive the quantum state towards the ground state manifold.
We propose a polynomial-time algorithm for preparing the Gibbs state of the two-dimensional toric code Hamiltonian at any temperature, starting from any initial state, significantly improving upon prior estimates that suggested exponential scaling with inverse temperature. We prove that fast mixing at low temperature for the two-dimensional toric code can be achieved by augmenting local jump operators with simple global jump operators, which enable efficient transitions between logical sectors. To establish tight lower bounds on the spectral gap, we introduce a new reduction method that eventually maps the problem to estimating the spectral gap of a perturbed graph Laplacian on a stair graph. Our proof also shows that the Lindblad dynamics with a digitally implemented low-temperature local Davies generator is able to efficiently drive the quantum state toward the ground state manifold.
Gibbs state preparation, or Gibbs sampling, is a key computational technique extensively used in physics, statistics, and other scientific fields. Recent efforts for designing fast mixing Gibbs samplers for quantum Hamiltonians have largely focused on commuting local Hamiltonians (CLHs), a non-trivial subclass of Hamiltonians which include highly entangled systems such as the Toric code and quantum double model. Most previous Gibbs samplers relied on simulating the Davies generator, which is a Lindbladian associated with the thermalization process in nature.Instead of using the Davies generator, we design a different Gibbs sampler for various CLHs by giving a reduction to classical Hamiltonians, in the sense that one can efficiently prepare the Gibbs state for some CLH H on a quantum computer as long as one can efficiently do classical Gibbs sampling for the corresponding classical Hamiltonian H ( c ) . We demonstrate that our Gibbs sampler is able to replicate state-of-the-art results as well as prepare the Gibbs state in regimes which were previously unknown, such as the low temperature region, as long as there exists fast mixing Gibbs samplers for the corresponding classical Hamiltonians. Our reductions are as follows.– If H is a 2-local qudit CLH, then H ( c ) is a 2-local qudit classical Hamiltonian.– If H is a 4-local qubit CLH on 2D lattice and there are no classical qubits, then H ( c ) is a 2-local qudit classical Hamiltonian on a planar graph. As an example, our algorithm can prepare the Gibbs state for the (defected) Toric code at any non-zero temperature in O ( n 2 p o l y ( l o g n ) ) time.– If H is a 4-local qubit CLH on 2D lattice and there are classical qubits, assuming that quantum terms are uniformly correctable, then H ( c ) is a constant-local classical Hamiltonian.
We present hybrid Gibbs sampling algorithms for the stabilizer code Hamiltonians of the rotated surface code and the toric code with only local quantum algorithms, using ∼L/2 quantum circuit depth to prepare the Gibbs state of the rotated surface code Hamiltonian, and L quantum circuit depth to prepare the Gibbs state of the toric code Hamiltonian, being L the side of the side of the square lattice. We further show that if we allow for non-local gates, the Gibbs state of the periodic 1D Ising model can be prepared in logarithmic depth and linearly many simultaneous measurements.
The preparation of quantum Gibbs states is a crucial task in quantum computing. In this work, we prove that a recently introduced, efficiently implementable dissipative evolution thermalizes to the Gibbs state in time scaling polynomially or even logarithmically with system size at high enough temperatures for any Hamiltonian that satisfies a Lieb-Robinson bound, such as local Hamiltonians on a lattice. Furthermore, we show the efficient adiabatic preparation of the associated purifications or "thermofield double"states. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first results rigorously establishing the efficient preparation of high-temperature Gibbs states and their purifications. In the low-temperature regime, we show that implementing this family of dissipative evolutions for inverse temperatures polynomial in the system's size is computationally equivalent to standard quantum computations. On a technical level, for high temperatures, our proof makes use of the mapping of the generator of the evolution into a Hamiltonian, and then connecting its convergence to that of the infinite temperature limit. We further present an alternative proof that is based on showing the exponential decay of the so-called oscillator norm, yielding convergence in logarithmic times. For low temperature, we instead perform a perturbation at zero temperature and resort to circuit-to-Hamiltonian mappings akin to the proof of universality of quantum adiabatic computing. Taken together, our results show that a family of quasi-local dissipative evolutions efficiently prepares a large class of quantum many-body states of interest, and has the potential to mirror the success of classical Monte Carlo methods for quantum many-body systems.
Many physical phenomena, including thermalization in open quantum systems and quantum Gibbs sampling, are modeled by Lindbladians approximating a system weakly coupled to a bath. Understanding the convergence speed of these Lindbladians to their steady states is crucial for bounding algorithmic runtimes and thermalization timescales. We study two such families of processes: one characterizing a repeated-interaction Gibbs sampling algorithm, and another modeling open many-body quantum thermalization. We prove that both converge in polynomial time for several non-commuting systems, including high-temperature local lattices, weakly interacting fermions, and 1D spin chains. These results demonstrate that simple dissipative quantum algorithms can prepare complex Gibbs states and that Lindblad dynamics accurately capture thermal relaxation. Our proofs rely on a novel technical result that extrapolates spectral gap lower bounds from quasi-local Lindbladians to the non-local generators governing these dynamics.
We introduce the notion of polynomial-depth duality transformations, which relates two sets of operator algebras through a conjugation by a poly-depth quantum circuit, and make use of this to construct efficient Gibbs samplers for a variety of interesting quantum Hamiltonians as they are poly-depth dual to classical Hamiltonians. This is, for example, the case for the two-dimensional toric code, which is demonstrated to be poly-depth dual to two decoupled classical Ising spin chains for any system size, and we give evidence that such dualities hold for a wide class of stabilizer Hamiltonians. Additionally, we extend the above notion of duality to Lindbladians in order to show that mixing times and other quantities such as the spectral gap or the modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality are preserved under duality.