Rapid mixing of quantum spin chains at any finite temperature

Abstract

We prove that a quasi-local quantum Gibbs sampler rapidly mixes to the Gibbs state of any 1D finite-range Hamiltonian at all finite temperatures in $\mathcal{O}\left(\log (n/\varepsilon)\right)$ time. Each update traces out a contiguous block of constant length and reconstructs it using the Petz recovery map, following early proposals for quantum heat-bath Gibbs samplers by Kastoryano and Brandão~\cite{kastoryano2016quantum}. Our proof directly bounds the distance between the updated state and the target Gibbs state using quantum Wasserstein distance of order $1$. We further provide $\mathcal{O}(\text{polylog}(n/\varepsilon))$ depth of quantum circuits to prepare these Gibbs states. We hope these techniques will facilitate the analysis and design of other Gibbs samplers.