Single-shot ground-state preparation via strongly coupled baths
Abstract
Preparing ground and thermal states of quantum many-body systems is a central task in quantum simulation. Dissipative protocols have emerged as a promising solution for both near-term and fault-tolerant hardware, but most constructions rely on weak system-bath coupling, leading to slow cooling. Here, we construct cooling protocols at strong system-bath coupling, and demonstrate accurate state preparation within even a single cooling cycle. Our protocols combine dynamically ramped ancilla energy levels with time-dependent couplings to optimize the trade-off between cooling error and physical time. For a general class of free-fermion systems, we reduce the dynamics exactly to a two-level scattering problem: ground-state cooling becomes a control problem of maximizing resonant excitation transfer while suppressing non-adiabatic heating. We then construct a family of ``Möbius-Ingham'' protocols, which reach optimal error scaling for gapless spectra and almost-exponential suppression of the leading heating error for gapped spectra, as a function of the cycle period. In our free-fermion benchmarks, Möbius-Ingham cooling lies on the Pareto frontier between steady-state error and cooling time among the controls tested. We further demonstrate its effectiveness in interacting Ising and t-V chains and the two-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model. Finally, we extend our construction to Gibbs state preparation, showing how free-fermion thermal states can be prepared in a single cycle.
Related
- Low-Depth Initial-State Preparation for Ground-State Energy Estimation of Two-Dimensional Strongly Correlated Systems
- Ground-State Properties of a Lattice-Coupled Strongly Correlated Model for Solid Oxygen under Pressure
- Variational Polaron Theory for Ground States of Strongly Coupled Light-Matter and Electron-Phonon Systems
- Variational Polaron Theory for Ground States of Strongly Coupled Light-Matter and Electron-Phonon Systems.
- Imaginary-time-enhanced feedback-based quantum algorithms for ground-state preparation
BibTeX
@misc{mo2026singleshot,
title = {{Single-shot ground-state preparation via strongly coupled baths}},
author = {Liang-Hong Mo and Jerome Lloyd and Yuxuan Zhang and Dmitry A. Abanin and Biao Lian},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.07021},
eprint = {2611.07021},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07021},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Single-shot ground-state preparation via strongly coupled baths
AU - Liang-Hong Mo
AU - Jerome Lloyd
AU - Yuxuan Zhang
AU - Dmitry A. Abanin
AU - Biao Lian
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/04
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.07021
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07021
AB - Preparing ground and thermal states of quantum many-body systems is a central task in quantum simulation. Dissipative protocols have emerged as a promising solution for both near-term and fault-tolerant hardware, but most constructions rely on weak system-bath coupling, leading to slow cooling. Here, we construct cooling protocols at strong system-bath coupling, and demonstrate accurate state preparation within even a single cooling cycle. Our protocols combine dynamically ramped ancilla energy levels with time-dependent couplings to optimize the trade-off between cooling error and physical time. For a general class of free-fermion systems, we reduce the dynamics exactly to a two-level scattering problem: ground-state cooling becomes a control problem of maximizing resonant excitation transfer while suppressing non-adiabatic heating. We then construct a family of ``Möbius-Ingham'' protocols, which reach optimal error scaling for gapless spectra and almost-exponential suppression of the leading heating error for gapped spectra, as a function of the cycle period. In our free-fermion benchmarks, Möbius-Ingham cooling lies on the Pareto frontier between steady-state error and cooling time among the controls tested. We further demonstrate its effectiveness in interacting Ising and t-V chains and the two-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model. Finally, we extend our construction to Gibbs state preparation, showing how free-fermion thermal states can be prepared in a single cycle.
ER -