Quantum advantage by designing beneficial dissipation from lossless dynamics
Abstract
Passive loss removes probability from a system and therefore seems unable to improve an unconditional target. This intuition is exact for classical population dynamics under sink-only removal: passive killing obeys a finite-strength monotonicity principle even after optimization over the remaining controls. Here we show that coherent quantum dynamics can violate this classical monotonicity because coherent contributions to the final target can interfere destructively. We derive a trajectory-level criterion that determines when such a detrimental contribution is physically accessible to passive loss and accumulates into a net unconditional benefit. The criterion is encoded in a response operator constructed entirely from the lossless dynamics: its spectrum determines whether weak passive loss can help, while its principal eigenvector identifies the optimal environmental mode. Applying this criterion to vibronically assisted transfer, we identify a beneficial mode formed by coherently combining two individually detrimental local loss directions. The predicted mode remains near-optimal at finite loss, producing an 8.73% enhancement over the independently optimized lossless benchmark, compared with 9.52% under full finite-loss optimization. Our results establish how coherent quantum dynamics can evade classical passive-loss monotonicity and provide a general task-dependent principle for designing beneficial passive environments from lossless dynamics.
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BibTeX
@misc{li2026quantum,
title = {{Quantum advantage by designing beneficial dissipation from lossless dynamics}},
author = {Zeng-Zhao Li and Xiao Xue},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.38183},
eprint = {2610.38183},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38183},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Quantum advantage by designing beneficial dissipation from lossless dynamics
AU - Zeng-Zhao Li
AU - Xiao Xue
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.38183
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38183
AB - Passive loss removes probability from a system and therefore seems unable to improve an unconditional target. This intuition is exact for classical population dynamics under sink-only removal: passive killing obeys a finite-strength monotonicity principle even after optimization over the remaining controls. Here we show that coherent quantum dynamics can violate this classical monotonicity because coherent contributions to the final target can interfere destructively. We derive a trajectory-level criterion that determines when such a detrimental contribution is physically accessible to passive loss and accumulates into a net unconditional benefit. The criterion is encoded in a response operator constructed entirely from the lossless dynamics: its spectrum determines whether weak passive loss can help, while its principal eigenvector identifies the optimal environmental mode. Applying this criterion to vibronically assisted transfer, we identify a beneficial mode formed by coherently combining two individually detrimental local loss directions. The predicted mode remains near-optimal at finite loss, producing an 8.73% enhancement over the independently optimized lossless benchmark, compared with 9.52% under full finite-loss optimization. Our results establish how coherent quantum dynamics can evade classical passive-loss monotonicity and provide a general task-dependent principle for designing beneficial passive environments from lossless dynamics.
ER -