Saturation of Thermal Complexity of Purification

TL;DR

This paper investigates the complexity of purifying thermal states of a harmonic oscillator, showing it saturates at high temperatures, implying a limit on the operator cost for thermal state preparation.

Contribution

It introduces a method to compute the complexity of thermal states via squeezing parameters, revealing saturation behavior at high temperatures and extending to quantum fields in curved spacetime.

Findings

Complexity saturates at high temperatures.

Optimal squeezing angle minimizes complexity.

Implications for quantum information in cosmology.

Abstract

We purify the thermal density matrix of a free harmonic oscillator as a two-mode squeezed state, characterized by a squeezing parameter and squeezing angle. While the squeezing parameter is fixed by the temperature and frequency of the oscillator, the squeezing angle is otherwise undetermined, so that the complexity of purification is obtained by minimizing the complexity of the squeezed state over the squeezing angle. The resulting complexity of the thermal state is minimized at non-zero values of the squeezing angle and saturates to an order one number at high temperatures, indicating that there is no additional operator cost required to build thermal states beyond a certain temperature. We also review applications in which thermal density matrices arise for quantum fields on curved spacetimes, including Hawking radiation and a simple model of decoherence of cosmological density perturbations in the early Universe. The complexity of purification for these mixed states also saturates as a function of the effective temperature, which may have interesting consequences for the quantum information stored in these systems.