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arXiv:2503.23469 · PRX Quantum

Efficient Simulation of Nontrivial Dissipative Spin Chains via Stochastic Unraveling

Andrew Pocklington, Aashish A. Clerk

Published Aug 6, 2025• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We present a new technique for efficiently simulating (in polynomial time) a class of one-dimensional (1D) dissipative spin chains that, when mapped to fermions, have quadratic Hamiltonians, with the only nonlinearity coming from Jordan-Wigner strings appearing in the jump operators, despite the fact that these models cannot be mapped to quadratic fermionic master equations. We show that many such Lindblad master equations admit an exact stochastic unraveling, with individual trajectories evolving as Gaussian fermionic states, even though the full master equation describes a system inequivalent to free fermions. This allows one to calculate arbitrary observables efficiently without sign problems, and with bounded sampling complexity. We utilize this new technique to study three paradigmatic dissipative effects: the melting of antiferromagnetic order in the presence of local loss, many-body subradiant phenomenon in systems with correlated loss, and nonequilibrium steady states of a 1D dissipative transverse-field Ising model. Beyond simply providing a powerful numerical technique, our method can also be used to gain both qualitative and quantitative insights into the role of interactions in these models.

DOI
10.1103/vptq-xy6h

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We present a new technique for efficiently simulating (in polynomial time) a class of one-dimensional (1D) dissipative spin chains that, when mapped to fermions, have quadratic Hamiltonians, with the only nonlinearity coming from Jordan-Wigner strings appearing in the jump operators, despite the fact that these models cannot be mapped to quadratic fermionic master equations. We show that many such Lindblad master equations admit an exact stochastic unraveling, with individual trajectories evolving as Gaussian fermionic states, even though the full master equation describes a system inequivalent to free fermions. This allows one to calculate arbitrary observables efficiently without sign problems, and with bounded sampling complexity. We utilize this new technique to study three paradigmatic dissipative effects: the melting of antiferromagnetic order in the presence of local loss, many-body subradiant phenomenon in systems with correlated loss, and nonequilibrium steady states of a 1D dissipative transverse-field Ising model. Beyond simply providing a powerful numerical technique, our method can also be used to gain both qualitative and quantitative insights into the role of interactions in these models.
We introduce a mapping between the ground state of interacting fermionic Hamiltonians and the non-equilibrium steady state of a purely dissipative open quantum system. Within the framework of third quantization, we map the Fermi-Hubbard Hamiltonian onto Lindblad jump operators acting on Majorana fermions. Remarkably, both hopping and interaction terms map onto jump operators that preserve the Gaussianity of Majorana fermions along individual quantum trajectories. As a result, the dynamics can be unravelled and each trajectory can be simulated efficiently using only two-point correlation functions, with a computational cost that scales polynomially with system size. We further show that finite particle number requires negative dissipative rates, leading to an intrinsically non-Markovian dynamics. The corresponding trajectory unravelling involves both positive and negative stochastic weights and exhibits a sign problem and large fluctuations, so that convergence requires an exponentially large number of trajectories. The overall computational cost remains exponential in system size despite the efficient Gaussian representation of individual trajectories, but is crucially dependent on the computational complexity of the non-Markovian unravelling, motivating further studies on the efficiency of such unravellings.
Directly in the thermodynamic limit, we show how to combine local imaginary and real-time evolution of tensor networks to efficiently and accurately find the nonequilibrium steady states (NESSs) of one-dimensional dissipative quantum lattices governed by a local Lindblad master equation. The imaginary time evolution first bypasses any highly correlated portions of the real-time evolution trajectory by directly converging to the weakly correlated subspace of the NESS, after which, real-time evolution completes the convergence to the NESS with high accuracy. We demonstrate the power of the method with the dissipative transverse field quantum Ising chain. We show that a crossover of an order parameter shown to be smooth in previous finite-size studies remains smooth in the thermodynamic limit.
We propose an efficient numerical method to compute configuration averages of observables in disordered open quantum systems whose dynamics can be unraveled via stochastic trajectories. We prove that the optimal sampling of trajectories and disorder configurations is simply achieved by considering one random disorder configuration for each individual trajectory. As a first application, we exploit the present method to study the role of disorder on the physics of the driven-dissipative Bose-Hubbard model in two different regimes: (i) for strong interactions, we explore the dissipative physics of fermionized bosons in disordered one-dimensional chains; (ii) for weak interactions, we investigate the role of on-site inhomogeneities on a first-order dissipative phase transition in a two-dimensional square lattice.
We propose a semiclassical framework for solving open quantum dynamics in driven-dissipative spin systems. Our method consists of generalized spin-wave approximations tailored to describing quantum trajectories unravelled from the master equation, and generically applies to regimes beyond the reach of conventional spin-wave theories, including short-range interactions and local quantum jumps, enabling the efficient simulation of large-scale interacting spins. We illustrate the versatility of our framework by studying a variable-range driven-dissipative Ising model on a 2D lattice. When the dissipation acts along the drive axis, we find a continuous phase transition breaking the Z2\mathbb{Z}_2Z2​ symmetry, and demonstrate that the interaction range, when tuned from fully-connected to nearest-neighbour, profoundly alters the universality class of the criticality. With the dissipation along the interaction axis, we show the emergence of a first-order transition. Demonstrated with both state-diffusion and quantum-jump types of trajectory dynamics, our framework provides a powerful toolbox for the efficient semiclassical description of non-equilibrium dynamics and many-body phases in spin systems.
Many-body open quantum systems are exposed to an essentially uncontrollable environment that acts as a source of decoherence and dissipation. As the exact treatment of such models is generally unfeasible, it is favourable to formulate an approximate description by means of the dynamics of the reduced density operator of the system. When studying models with a weak coupling to a memoryless environment, the existence of such solution is granted and the reduced dynamics is governed by the Lindblad quantum master equation. In recent years, open quantum systems have evolved into a major field of studies. Focus of these studies are the characterization of emergent phenomena and dissipative phase transitions, as well as the ongoing debate about whether quantum computing schemes are still hard to simulate classically --- and thus achieve quantum supremacy --- when in presence of some degree of noise-induced decoherence. However, the challenge posed by this task lies in the complexity of the density matrix that increases exponentially with the system size, and the quest for efficient numerical methods is a research field that is still in its infancy. Here, we first develop a real-time full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo technique that stems from a class of methods generally known as projector Monte Carlo. The approach enables the stochastic sampling of the Lindblad time evolution of the density matrix thanks to a massively parallel algorithm, thus providing estimates of observables on the non-equilibrium steady state. We present the underlying theory and introduce an initiator technique and importance sampling to reduce statistical error. We demonstrate the efficiency of the approach by applying it to the dissipative two-dimensional XYZ spin-1/2 model on a lattice. As the importance sampling of projector approaches is often combined with variational results, we then introduce a novel method that is based on the variational Monte Carlo methods and on a neural network representation of the density matrix. Thanks to the stochastic reconfiguration scheme, the application of the variational principle is translated into the actual integration of the Lindblad quantum master equation. We test the effectiveness of the method by modeling the steady state of the dissipative two-dimensional XYZ spin-1/2 model through a dissipative phase transition, and also the real-time dynamics of the dissipative Ising model. In addition, we discuss the application of the developed methods and the open questions of the field.
To create a more comprehensive understanding of nonequilibrium dynamics of open quantum many-body systems, we visit an exactly solvable example, that is a quenched transverse-field Ising chain coupled to Markovian baths, which act locally on the Jordan-Wigner fermionic space. Performing explicit calculations on the heat transfer, transverse magnetization, and kink density, we find that the imbalance of two opposite damping mechanisms play a crucial role in constructing a nontrivial nonequilibrium steady state accompanied with a dissipative quantum phase transition, also that the competition between unitary drive and decoherence does not necessarily lead to a quasi-stationary state or prethermalization under certain ordinary relaxation.