The computation of thermal properties of quantum many-body systems is a central challenge in our understanding of quantum mechanics. We introduce the Quantum Finite Temperature Lanczos Method (QFTLM), which extends the finite-temperature Lanczos method to quantum computers by combining real-time quantum Krylov methods with efficient preparation of typical states for trace estimation. This approach enables the computation of thermal expectation values while avoiding the exponential scaling inherent to classical exact simulation techniques. Numerical experiments on the transverse-field Ising model show that QFTLM can reproduce thermal observables over a wide temperature range. We further analyze the influence of Krylov dimension, number of trace-estimator states, and Trotter error, and show that suitable regularization is essential for robustness in noisy settings. These results establish QFTLM as a promising framework for finite-temperature quantum simulation.
The computation of thermal properties of quantum many-body systems is a central challenge in our understanding of quantum mechanics. We introduce the Quantum Finite Temperature Lanczos Method (QFTLM), which extends the finite-temperature Lanczos method to quantum computers by combining real-time quantum Krylov methods with efficient preparation of typical states for trace estimation. This approach enables the computation of thermal expectation values while avoiding the exponential scaling inherent to classical exact simulation techniques. Numerical experiments on the transverse-field Ising model show that QFTLM can reproduce thermal observables over a wide temperature range. We further analyze the influence of Krylov dimension, number of trace-estimator states, and Trotter error, and show that suitable regularization is essential for robustness in noisy settings. These results establish QFTLM as a promising framework for finite-temperature quantum simulation.
Accurately evaluating finite-temperature properties of quantum many-body systems remains a central challenge. Many existing quantum approaches require thermal-state preparation at each target temperature, making low-temperature calculations especially demanding in terms of circuit depth and accuracy.
In this work, we present the finite-temperature quantum Krylov (FTQK) method, which combines stochastic trace estimation with a Hermitian generalized eigenvalue problem based on cos(H~). The only quantum-side input required is the temperature-independent real-time overlap sequence gn=⟨φ∣e−inτH∣φ⟩. All benchmark results presented in this work were obtained from classical numerical simulations of the quantum-circuit protocol. For periodic spin-21 Heisenberg chains with N=14 and 18, FTQK accurately reproduces the specific heat, magnetic susceptibility, and entropy in the noiseless case. It also accurately reproduces the specific heat of the N=14 honeycomb Kitaev model, demonstrating that FTQK can be applied beyond simple one-dimensional chains to a model on a two-dimensional lattice with bond-dependent interactions. Furthermore, in a proof-of-principle finite-shot study for the N=14 Heisenberg chain, the main thermodynamic features remain well preserved even at σ=10−3. Here, σ=1/Nshot, where Nshot is the number of shots used to estimate an overlap. These results demonstrate the potential of FTQK for finite-temperature calculations using reusable, temperature-independent real-time overlap data.
Magnetic molecules promise progress in a wide variety of fields ranging from high density memory storage to quantum computing as well as magnetic cooling. In order to gain better insight this work aims at the study of theoretical models and evaluation of thermodynamic observables by implementing and testing a new numerical approximation method - the Finite-Temperature Lanczos-Method (FTLM). Magnetic centres of molecules are modelled as spins of fixed quantum number, position and interactions. The model is specified in a spin Hamiltonian consisting of three parts: Heisenberg exchange, single ion anisotropy and Zeeman interaction. Although finite, the dimension of the Hilbert space grows exponentially with the number of spin sites, so full diagonalisation of the Hamiltonian is rendered infeasible: Even for a small number of spins the Hilbert space dimension exceeds several millions, which is beyond exact diagonalisation techniques. In order to calculate observables yet, it is necessary to implement approximation methods. Following previous work, where the Hilbert space could be partitioned into invariant subspaces with respect to magnetic quantum numbers, now systems with anisotropy are studied. These anisotropic terms generally do not commute with total spin operators, therefore partitioning no longer helps reducing the problem size. There are several techniques for approximate solutions to eigenvalue equations, among these adaptations of the original Lanczos method. As a Krylov subspace method, its main advantage is that the most complex operations required are matrix-vector multiplications. When matrix elements are calculated on-the-fly, the most economical version requires storage of only two vectors. The second ingredient for FTLM is a typicality based Monte Carlo approach: Traces are estimated as an average over a tiny set of initial vectors compared to the full Hilbert space. First tests revealed a major flaw due to numerical instability of traces that normally are zero. By partitioning with respect to magnetic quantum numbers, especially exploiting their inversion symmetry, this problem was unknowingly dodged in previous calculations. It was solved while preserving the advantage of minimal computational effort: An arbitrary set of initial vectors would regain this time-reversal symmetry only, if a substantial number of initial vectors where used. Instead, a doubling of the initial vectors by inverting them with respect to magnetic quantum numbers yields the desired effect. Time-consuming evaluations of matrix elements were also avoided by calculating the magnetisation as a difference quotient. Finally FTLM is implemented and tested for several magnetic molecules. Analogues of the hour glass molecules synthesised by Glaser et al. were first model systems, showing good agreement of exact diagonalisation results and approximations. The method can be applied to any Hamiltonian, given that matrix-vector products in the underlying Hilbert space can be calculated. Here limiting factors are memory usage and computing time. As a proof of principle observables in a Hilbert space consisting of d=100,000,000 states were calculated using the parameter set suggested by Mazurenko et al. for the Mn12-acetate molecule. Single crystal as well as powder averaged results are compared to experimental data. So this previously impossible calculation is now executed within hours by use of FTLM.
Simulating thermal-equilibrium properties at finite temperature is crucial for studying quantum many-body systems. Quantum computers are expected to enable us to simulate large systems at finite temperatures, overcoming challenges faced by classical computers, such as the sign problem of the quantum Monte Carlo technique. Conventional methods suitable for fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) devices are designed for studying large-scale quantum many-body systems but require a large number of ancilla qubits and a deep quantum circuit with many basic gates, making them unsuitable for the early stage of the FTQC era, when the availability of qubits and quantum gates is limited. In this paper, we propose a method suitable for quantum devices in this early stage to calculate the thermal-equilibrium expectation value of an observable at finite temperatures. Our proposal, named the Markov chain Monte Carlo with sampled pairs of unitaries (MCMC-SPU) algorithm, involves sampling simple quantum circuits and generating the corresponding statistical ensembles. This approach addresses the issues of resource demand and the decay in probability associated with postselection of measurement outcomes on ancilla qubits. We validate our proposal with a numerical simulation of the one-dimensional transverse-field Ising model as an illustrative example.
The study of quantum many-body systems is crucial to our understanding of nature at the microscopic scale. As analytical solutions quickly become intractable, the development of efficient computational simulation techniques is indispensable to predict the behaviour of quantum systems. This task is particularly challenging as the dimension of the underlying Hilbert space grows exponentially with the system size. While classical computational methods have achieved remarkable success in specific regimes, their applicability is fundamentally limited by this exponential scaling. Quantum computers offer a natural platform for representing and simulating quantum systems, but current devices are constrained by noise and limited qubit counts, drastically restricting the algorithms that can be run. In this context, hybrid quantum-classical algorithms provide a promising approach to combine the strengths of both paradigms. This thesis develops hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for the simulation of quantum many-body systems. The key idea is to perform classically difficult tasks on near-term quantum devices, while leveraging classical computational power to control, correct, and extend the obtained results. Within this framework, we introduce two complementary approaches for the simulation of quantum dynamics. The first method employs circuit knitting techniques to distribute variational quantum simulations across multiple quantum devices. The entanglement between weakly coupled clusters of highly correlated spins is recovered in classical post-processing, where the overhead is controlled through a constrained optimisation problem. The second method combines a simplified, Trotterised quantum dynamics simulation with a parametrised classical ansatz trained to correct for the approximations made on the quantum device. We show that this method can be employed to correct Trotter errors, implement long-range gates with hardware-efficient circuits, or simulate larger systems by incorporating additional degrees of freedom purely classically. In addition, we present a hybrid approach to computing thermal properties of quantum many-body systems via the Quantum Finite Temperature Lanczos Method. A Krylov subspace is generated on a quantum computer by combining the efficient preparation of typical states with real-time evolution. A classical computer then diagonalises the system in the low-dimensional subspace and estimates the finite-temperature expectation values through trace estimation. The results presented in this thesis demonstrate that hybrid quantum-classical algorithms can expand the range of systems that can be studied on near-term quantum devices. Conversely, we show that incorporating quantum subroutines into classical simulation techniques can improve their efficiency. These results suggest that, rather than treating classical and quantum simulation as competing paradigms, their careful integration can provide a more effective route toward practical quantum many-body simulation.
We present an algorithm that uses block encoding on a quantum computer to exactly construct a Krylov space, which can be used as the basis for the Lanczos method to estimate extremal eigenvalues of Hamiltonians. While the classical Lanczos method has exponential cost in the system size to represent the Krylov states for quantum systems, our efficient quantum algorithm achieves this in polynomial time and memory. The construction presented is exact in the sense that the resulting Krylov space is identical to that of the Lanczos method, so the only approximation with respect to the exact method is due to finite sample noise. This is possible because, unlike previous quantum Krylov methods, our algorithm does not require simulating real or imaginary time evolution. We provide an explicit error bound for the resulting ground state energy estimate in the presence of noise. For our method to be successful efficiently, the only requirement on the input problem is that the overlap of the initial state with the true ground state must be Ω ( 1 / poly ( n ) ) for n qubits.
Thermal properties of nanomaterials are crucial to not only improving our fundamental understanding of condensed matter systems, but also to developing novel materials for applications spanning research and industry. Since quantum effects arise at the nano-scale, these systems are difficult to simulate on classical computers. Quantum computers can efficiently simulate quantum many-body systems, yet current quantum algorithms for calculating thermal properties of these systems incur significant computational costs in that they either prepare the full thermal state on the quantum computer, or they must sample a number of pure states from a distribution that grows with system size. Canonical thermal pure quantum (TPQ) states provide a promising path to estimating thermal properties of quantum materials as they neither require preparation of the full thermal state nor require a growing number of samples with system size. Here, we present an algorithm for preparing canonical TPQ states on quantum computers. We compare three different circuit implementations for the algorithm and demonstrate their capabilities in estimating thermal properties of quantum materials. Due to its increasing accuracy with system size and flexibility in implementation, we anticipate that this method will enable finite temperature explorations of relevant quantum materials on near-term quantum computers.