Exponential Lindbladian fast forwarding and exponential amplification of certain Gibbs state properties

Abstract

Fast-forwarding refers to the ability to simulate a system of time $t$ using significantly fewer than $t$ queries or circuit depth. While various Hamiltonian systems are known to circumvent the no fast-forwarding theorem, analogous results for dissipative dynamics, governed by Lindbladians, remain largely unexplored. We first present a quantum algorithm for simulating purely dissipative Lindbladians with unitary jump operators, achieving additive query complexity $\mathcal{O}\left(t + \log(\varepsilon^{-1})\right)$ up to error~$\varepsilon$, improving previous algorithms. When the jump operators have certain structures (i.e., block-diagonal Paulis), the algorithm can be modified to achieve exponential fast-forwarding, attaining circuit depth $\mathcal{O}\left(\log\left(t + \log(\varepsilon^{-1})\right)\right)$, while preserving query complexity via parallel access. Using these fast-forwarding techniques, we develop a quantum algorithm for estimating Gibbs state properties of the form $\langle ψ_1 | e^{-β(H + I)} | ψ_2 \rangle$, up to additive error $ε$, with $H$ the Hamiltonian and $β$ the inverse temperature. For input states exhibiting certain coherence conditions -- e.g.,~$\langle 0|^{\otimes n} e^{-β(H + I)} |+\rangle^{\otimes n}$ -- our method achieves exponential improvement in complexity (measured by circuit depth), $\mathcal{O} (2^{-n/2} ε^{-1} \log β),$ compared to the quantum singular value transformation-based approach, with complexity $\tilde{\mathcal{O}} (ε^{-1} \sqrtβ )$. We show how to apply this exponential improvement to applications such as the ground state overlap testing and amplitude estimation. For general $| ψ_1 \rangle$ and $| ψ_2 \rangle$, we also show how the level of improvement is changed with the coherence resource in $| ψ_1 \rangle$ and $| ψ_2 \rangle$.