Alvaro Martin Alhambra

We show that spin chains in thermal equilibrium have a correlation structure in which individual regions are strongly correlated at most with their near vicinity. We quantify this with alternative notions of the conditional mutual information defined through the so-called Belavkin-Staszewski relative entropy. We prove that these measures decay super-exponentially, under the assumption that the spin chain Hamiltonian is translation-invariant. Using a recovery map associated with these measures, we sequentially construct tensor network approximations in terms of marginals of small (sub-logarithmic) size. As a main application, we show that classical representations of the states can be learned efficiently from local measurements with a polynomial sample complexity. We also prove an approximate factorization condition for the purity of the entire Gibbs state, which implies that it can be efficiently estimated to a small multiplicative error from a small number of local measurements. As a technical step of independent interest, we show an upper bound to the decay of the Belavkin-Staszewski relative entropy upon the application of a conditional expectation.

The preparation of thermal states of matter is a crucial task in quantum simulation. In this work, we prove that an efficiently implementable dissipative evolution recently introduced by Chen et al. thermalizes into its equilibrium Gibbs state in time scaling polynomially 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 Lindbladians for inverse temperatures logarithmic in the system's size is polynomially equivalent to standard quantum computation. On a technical level, for high temperatures, our proof makes use of the mapping of the generator of the evolution into a Hamiltonian and the analysis of the stability of its gap. For low temperature, we instead perform a perturbation at zero temperature of the Laplace transform of the energy observable at fixed runtime, and resort to circuit-to-Hamiltonian mappings akin to the proof of universality of quantum adiabatic computing. Taken together, our results show that the family of Lindbladians of Chen et al. efficiently prepares a large class of quantum many-body states of interest, and have the potential to mirror the success of classical Monte Carlo methods for quantum many-body systems.

Recent progress in the development of quantum technologies has enabled the direct investigation of dynamics of increasingly complex quantum many-body systems. This motivates the study of the complexity of classical algorithms for this problem in order to benchmark quantum simulators and to delineate the regime of quantum advantage. Here we present classical algorithms for approximating the dynamics of local observables and nonlocal quantities such as the Loschmidt echo, where the evolution is governed by a local Hamiltonian. For short times, their computational cost scales polynomially with the system size and the inverse of the approximation error. In the case of local observables, the proposed algorithm has a better dependence on the approximation error than algorithms based on the Lieb–Robinson bound. Our results use cluster expansion techniques adapted to the dynamical setting, for which we give a novel proof of their convergence. This has important physical consequences besides our efficient algorithms. In particular, we establish a novel quantum speed limit, a bound on dynamical phase transitions, and a concentration bound for product states evolved for short times.

Abstract One of the most fundamental problems in quantum many-body physics is the characterization of correlations among thermal states. Of particular relevance is the thermal area law, which justifies the tensor network approximations to thermal states with a bond dimension growing polynomially with the system size. In the regime of sufficiently low temperatures, which is particularly important for practical applications, the existing techniques do not yield optimal bounds. Here, we propose a new thermal area law that holds for generic many-body systems on lattices. We improve the temperature dependence from the original O(β)to ̃O(β^2/3), thereby suggesting diffusive propagation of entanglement by imaginary time evolution. This qualitatively differs from the real-time evolution which usually induces linear growth of entanglement. We also prove analogous bounds for the Rényi entanglement of purification and the entanglement of formation. Our analysis is based on a polynomial approximation to the exponential function which provides a relationship between the imaginary-time evolution and random walks. Moreover, for one-dimensional (1D) systems with n spins, we prove that the Gibbs state is well-approximated by a matrix product operator with a sublinear bond dimension of exp( ̃O(βlog(n))). This allows us to rigorously establish, for the first time, a quasi-linear time classical algorithm for constructing an MPS representation of 1D quantum Gibbs states at arbitrary temperatures ofβ=o(log(n)). Our new technical ingredient is a block decomposition of the Gibbs state, that bears resemblance to the decomposition of real-time evolution given by Haah et al., FOCS’18.

If the second law of thermodynamics forbids a transition from one state to another, then it is still possible to make the transition happen by using a sufficient amount of work. But if we do not have access to this amount of work, can the transition happen probabilistically? In the thermodynamic limit, this probability tends to zero, but here we find that for finite-sized systems, it can be finite. We compute the maximum probability of a transition or a thermodynamical fluctuation from any initial state to any final state, and show that this maximum can be achieved for any final state which is block-diagonal in the energy eigenbasis. As a bi-product, we introduce a finite set of thermodynamical monotones related to the thermo-majorization criteria which governs state transitions, and compute the work of transition in terms of them. We also find upper and lower bounds on this transition probability, in terms of the work of transition. These results, which allow one to not take the thermodynamic limit, are made possible by using and extending techniques from quantum information theory, developed in the context of understanding entanglement theory. As a consequence, our results find application in entanglement theory, and we find the amount of entanglement required (or gained) when transforming one pure entangled state into any other.