We propose a dynamical approach to identifying ground-state quantum phases through short-time dissipative cooling. Rather than determining the phase by preparing highly accurate approximations to ground states, we prepare a representative state of a candidate phase and monitor the early-time response of phase-sensitive observables under cooling dynamics tailored to the target Hamiltonian. For a class of phase-decision problems in which the relevant observables can be inferred from the low-energy manifold, and with jump operators implementable using only short-time Hamiltonian simulation, the dissipative evolution rapidly suppresses high-energy components and drives the system into a low-energy manifold whose observables already reveal the underlying ground-state phase, well before mixing to the steady state. We demonstrate this strategy for the frustrated $J_1$--$J_2$ Heisenberg chain, the Kitaev honeycomb model, and the XXZ chain, including Berezinskii--Kosterlitz--Thouless and topological phase transitions. In particular, coarse filter resolutions and short evolution times suffice to recover phase-sensitive quantities such as the Luttinger parameter and topological diagnostics. We further provide theoretical justification that cooling dynamics with such jump operators can rigorously prepare low-energy manifolds for free-fermionic and free-bosonic systems, and investigate this mechanism for interacting fermionic systems. Our results suggest that phase decision is a plausible target for future utility-scale studies on early fault-tolerant quantum devices.
We propose a dynamical approach to identifying ground-state quantum phases through short-time dissipative cooling. Rather than determining the phase by preparing highly accurate approximations to ground states, we prepare a representative state of a candidate phase and monitor the early-time response of phase-sensitive observables under cooling dynamics tailored to the target Hamiltonian. For a class of phase-decision problems in which the relevant observables can be inferred from the low-energy manifold, and with jump operators implementable using only short-time Hamiltonian simulation, the dissipative evolution rapidly suppresses high-energy components and drives the system into a low-energy manifold whose observables already reveal the underlying ground-state phase, well before mixing to the steady state. We demonstrate this strategy for the frustrated J1--J2 Heisenberg chain, the Kitaev honeycomb model, and the XXZ chain, including Berezinskii--Kosterlitz--Thouless and topological phase transitions. In particular, coarse filter resolutions and short evolution times suffice to recover phase-sensitive quantities such as the Luttinger parameter and topological diagnostics. We further provide theoretical justification that cooling dynamics with such jump operators can rigorously prepare low-energy manifolds for free-fermionic and free-bosonic systems, and investigate this mechanism for interacting fermionic systems. Our results suggest that phase decision is a plausible target for future utility-scale studies on early fault-tolerant quantum devices.
Inspired by natural cooling processes, dissipation has become a promising approach for preparing low-energy states of quantum systems. However, the potential of dissipative protocols remains unclear beyond certain commuting Hamiltonians. This work provides significant analytical and numerical insights into the power of dissipation for preparing the ground state of noncommuting Hamiltonians. For quasi-free dissipative dynamics, including certain 1D spin systems with boundary dissipation, our results reveal a new connection between the mixing time in trace distance and the spectral properties of a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, leading to an explicit and sharp bound on the mixing time that scales polynomially with system size. For more general spin systems, we develop a tensor network-based algorithm for constructing the Lindblad jump operator and for simulating the dynamics. Using this algorithm, we demonstrate numerically that dissipative ground state preparation protocols can achieve rapid mixing for certain 1D local Hamiltonians under bulk dissipation, with a mixing time that scales logarithmically with the system size. We then prove the rapid mixing result for certain weakly interacting spin and fermionic systems in arbitrary dimensions, extending recent results for high-temperature quantum Gibbs samplers to the zero-temperature regime. Together, these results show that dissipation can be a powerful tool for ground state preparation, with potential applications across condensed matter physics, quantum materials science, and beyond.
Preparing interacting quantum systems in low-energy or ground states is a fundamental task in quantum simulation and quantum information processing. In realistic settings, dissipation and active cooling can typically be engineered only on a limited subset of the system. We study the dissipative dynamics of excitation-number conserving quantum systems governed by a GKLS master equation with local jump operators acting on a subset of qubits. We establish sufficient conditions under which such localized dissipation drives the full system to a unique globally attractive zero-excitation state. In particular, we prove that if the Hamiltonian generates excitation transfer described by a graph for which the dissipative subsystem forms a zero forcing set, then the zero-excitation state is the unique globally attractive stationary state. When this state coincides with a ground state of the Hamiltonian, the same mechanism realizes ground-state cooling. Our results provide a graph-theoretic criterion for global state preparation from localized dissipation, which we illustrate using a nearest-neighbor Heisenberg spin chain. For this model, a reduction to the single-excitation sector further yields a scaling estimate with the length of the chain which indicates efficient cooling.
Strongly interacting fermions underpin some of the most challenging problems in condensed matter physics, such as high-temperature superconductivity. The low-energy states of these systems encode their essential microscopic properties, yet remain largely inaccessible to classical methods. Quantum simulation offers a promising path forward, and among state-preparation strategies, engineered dissipation has emerged as a particularly compelling approach. Existing cooling protocols, however, typically rely on knowledge of the quasiparticle spectrum or mappings to free-fermion limits. In this letter, we introduce a randomized, symmetry-preserving cooling algorithm that requires no spectral information, using only local coupling operators to ancilla degrees of freedom with randomly sampled energy splittings to drive generic fermionic systems toward their low-energy manifold. We benchmark the protocol on canonical correlated fermionic models relevant to high-temperature superconductors, spanning metallic, density-wave, paired, superconducting, and phase-separated phases. Across all models, we observe universal cooling behavior: monotonic energy relaxation, concentration of spectral weight at low energies, and stabilization of correlated ground-state order. Our results establish randomized dissipative cooling as a general strategy for preparing strongly correlated fermionic states on programmable quantum devices.
Dissipative state preparation engineers quantum many-body states as steady states of an open-system dynamics. The spatial range of the required dissipation sets both the feasibility of analog implementations and the connectivity and control complexity of digital ones. Yet how this locality quantitatively constrains preparation times remains largely unknown. Here, we establish an exact locality-preparation time relation for quadratic fermionic systems and develop a construction that optimizes the locality of the dissipative dynamics while preserving the target state. Applied to the Kitaev chain, our framework reveals sharply different locality-preparation time tradeoffs in critical and gapped regimes. At criticality, suppressing the algebraic tails of the jump operators necessarily forces the preparation time to grow algebraically with system size. By contrast, both trivial and topological gapped phases admit exponentially localized dissipation with a finite preparation time in the thermodynamic limit. Our results identify when fast dissipative preparation is compatible with local control and when criticality imposes an unavoidable dynamical cost.
Quantum algorithms for probing ground-state properties of quantum systems require good initial states. Projection-based methods such as eigenvalue filtering rely on inputs that have a significant overlap with the low-energy subspace, which can be challenging for large, strongly-correlated systems. This issue has motivated the study of physically-inspired dynamical approaches such as thermodynamic cooling. In this work, we introduce a ground-state preparation algorithm based on the simulation of quantum dynamics. Our main insight is to transform the Hamiltonian by a shifted sign function via quantum signal processing, effectively mapping eigenvalues into positive and negative subspaces separated by a large gap. This automatically ensures that all states within each subspace conserve energy with respect to the transformed Hamiltonian. Subsequent time-evolution with a perturbed Hamiltonian induces transitions to lower-energy states while preventing unwanted jumps to higher energy states. The approach does not rely on a priori knowledge of energy gaps and requires no additional qubits to model a bath. Furthermore, it makes O~(d3/2/ε) queries to the time-evolution operator of the system and O~(d3/2) queries to a block-encoding of the perturbation, for d cooling steps and an ε-accurate energy resolution. Our results provide a framework for combining quantum signal processing and Hamiltonian simulation to design heuristic quantum algorithms for ground-state preparation.
Ground-state preparation is a fundamental challenge in quantum many-body physics, chemistry and materials science. Dissipative state-preparation techniques engineer a Lindbladian coupling to a bath that drives the system to its ground state, needing no initial overlap. Their cost is dominated by the Hamiltonian simulations inside the filtered jump operators, since each jump is a weighted sum of Heisenberg-evolved copies, or branches, of a coupling operator. We reduce this cost by following three simple observations to their logical end. First, on a fixed time grid, linear programming optimises the branch weights, trading the heating response against the circuit cost. Second, Lieb--Robinson bounds let each branch evolve on a patch whose radius grows with its duration. Third, if the dynamics converges quickly and truncation changes the jumps only slightly, the stationary state stays near the ground state even on patches smaller than the light cone. We validate our approach numerically. On a grid of 81 evolution times, the optimised filter reduces the worst-case heating response, or leakage, more than 116-fold at equal cost. Across fifteen molecules and six chains, the cost falls by 27 to 56\% at matched design-grid leakage; at matched cost, the molecular leakage falls by a factor of 2.9 to 2×103. Density-matrix simulations show high ground-state fidelity for both filters, and on Ising and Hubbard chains the cheaper filter keeps a ground-state population of at least 0.89 on patches of three or four sites. The same patches fail on a Heisenberg chain whose truncation error falls more slowly with patch size and whose Lindbladian gap is 12 times smaller than the Ising chain's, pointing to a role for the gap in how far patches can be truncated. At fixed radius the per-branch cost becomes independent of system size, reducing the cost of dissipative state preparation.