Thermalizing quantum systems and evaluating partition functions with a quantum computer

David Poulin, Paweł Wocjan

We present a quantum algorithm to prepare the thermal Gibbs state of interacting quantum systems. This algorithm sets a universal upper bound D(alpha) on the thermalization time of a quantum system, where D is the system's Hilbert space dimension and alpha < or = 1/2 is proportional to the Helmholtz free energy density. We also derive an algorithm to evaluate the partition function of a quantum system in a time proportional to the system's thermalization time and inversely proportional to the targeted accuracy squared.

Andrew Jackson, Theodoros Kapourniotis, Animesh Datta

Yi-Ming Ding, Junsong Sun, Nvsen Ma +3 more

Efficient and accurate algorithms for partition function, free energy, and thermal entropy calculations is of great significance in statistical physics and quantum many-body physics. Here we present an unbiased but low-technical-barrier algorithm within the quantum Monte Carlo framework, which has exceptionally high accuracy and no systemic error. Compared with the conventional specific heat integral method and Wang-Landau sampling algorithm, our method can obtain a much more accurate result of the subleading coefficient of the entropy consistent with theory. This method can be widely used in both classical and quantum Monte Carlo simulations and is easy to be parallelized on a computer.

Bingyu Cui

A. Kuriyama, João da Providência, Y. Tsue +1 more

In order to compare the approach of the mixed state representation of the pairing model with the exact evaluation of the grand partition function, we introduce the fermion space of a grand canonical ensemble. For the definition of the grand partition function, we adopt a quasi-spin space and evaluate its multiplicity. then we show how to derive the mixed state representation, which yields results that are approximately the same as those of the thermal Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov theory for the thermal equilibrium state, from the grand partition function under the mean field approximation. We compare numerical results of the mean field approximation with those obtained from the exact evaluation of the grand partition function. We find that the mean field approximation gives good results. However, we find a distinctive difference between the two sets of results in the condensed phase.