Locality in Dissipative Ground-State Preparation

@misc{tang2026locality,
  title = {{Locality in Dissipative Ground-State Preparation}},
  author = {Qicheng Tang and Ruhanshi Barad and Xueda Wen},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.40628},
  eprint = {2610.40628},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40628},
}

TY  - UNPB
TI  - Locality in Dissipative Ground-State Preparation
AU  - Qicheng Tang
AU  - Ruhanshi Barad
AU  - Xueda Wen
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/29
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.40628
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40628
AB  - Can the ground state of a local Hamiltonian be prepared by local dissipation? We address this question for free-fermion Hamiltonians, using a quadratic Lindbladian with linear jump operators for the dissipative ground-state preparation. For translation-invariant targets, Fourier correspondence relates spatial locality to momentum-space analyticity, allowing us to derive a complete spectral criterion for the existence of exponentially local linear jump operators that prepare the ground state. This criterion leads to a no-go theorem that, sign-changing Fermi-level crossings exclude exponentially local linear jump operators for preparing the ground state. While these crossings are the complete obstruction in one dimension, additional obstructions generally arise in higher dimensions. We illustrate these additional obstructions using two quadratic-band-touching models with algebraically decaying ground-state correlations. We further show that short-range ground-state correlations, although not necessary, are sufficient for local dissipative preparation even without translation invariance. Our results establish how the spectral structure of the target Hamiltonian governs the locality of dissipative ground-state preparation.
ER  -