Locality-Preparation Time Tradeoffs in Dissipative Quantum Systems
Abstract
Dissipative state preparation engineers quantum many-body states as steady states of an open-system dynamics. The spatial range of the required dissipation sets both the feasibility of analog implementations and the connectivity and control complexity of digital ones. Yet how this locality quantitatively constrains preparation times remains largely unknown. Here, we establish an exact locality-preparation time relation for quadratic fermionic systems and develop a construction that optimizes the locality of the dissipative dynamics while preserving the target state. Applied to the Kitaev chain, our framework reveals sharply different locality-preparation time tradeoffs in critical and gapped regimes. At criticality, suppressing the algebraic tails of the jump operators necessarily forces the preparation time to grow algebraically with system size. By contrast, both trivial and topological gapped phases admit exponentially localized dissipation with a finite preparation time in the thermodynamic limit. Our results identify when fast dissipative preparation is compatible with local control and when criticality imposes an unavoidable dynamical cost.
Related
- Locality in Dissipative Ground-State Preparation
- Locality and filter design for dissipative ground-state preparation
- The Gated Quantum Resonator: a reduced-representation Hamiltonian–network framework for gated driven–dissipative quantum systems
- Digital Twin Modeling of Quantum Dynamical Systems: Dissipative Quantum Reservoir Computing
- Asymptotic Pseudospectra in Dissipative Floquet Quantum Systems: Geometric Structures and Observable Dynamics
BibTeX
@misc{westhoff2026localitypreparation,
title = {{Locality-Preparation Time Tradeoffs in Dissipative Quantum Systems}},
author = {Philipp Westhoff and Sara Murciano and Mattia Moroder},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.13784},
eprint = {2610.13784},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13784},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Locality-Preparation Time Tradeoffs in Dissipative Quantum Systems
AU - Philipp Westhoff
AU - Sara Murciano
AU - Mattia Moroder
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/09
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.13784
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13784
AB - Dissipative state preparation engineers quantum many-body states as steady states of an open-system dynamics. The spatial range of the required dissipation sets both the feasibility of analog implementations and the connectivity and control complexity of digital ones. Yet how this locality quantitatively constrains preparation times remains largely unknown. Here, we establish an exact locality-preparation time relation for quadratic fermionic systems and develop a construction that optimizes the locality of the dissipative dynamics while preserving the target state. Applied to the Kitaev chain, our framework reveals sharply different locality-preparation time tradeoffs in critical and gapped regimes. At criticality, suppressing the algebraic tails of the jump operators necessarily forces the preparation time to grow algebraically with system size. By contrast, both trivial and topological gapped phases admit exponentially localized dissipation with a finite preparation time in the thermodynamic limit. Our results identify when fast dissipative preparation is compatible with local control and when criticality imposes an unavoidable dynamical cost.
ER -