Quantum generalizations of Glauber and Metropolis dynamics

TL;DR

This paper develops quantum analogues of classical Glauber and Metropolis dynamics, providing efficient, detailed balanced, and local quantum Gibbs samplers with proven fast mixing at high temperatures.

Contribution

It introduces a discrete-time quantum Gibbs sampler that preserves key properties of continuous-time dynamics and offers a highly coherent alternative, advancing quantum simulation methods.

Findings

Spectral gap remains unchanged in the new sampler.

The high-temperature spectral gap is constant, ensuring fast mixing.

Exact detailed balance can be achieved for Metropolis-style Gibbs samplers.

Abstract

Classical Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods have been essential for simulating statistical physical systems and have proven well applicable to other systems with many degrees of freedom. Motivated by the statistical physics origins, Chen, Kastoryano, and Gily\'en [CKG23] proposed a continuous-time quantum thermodynamic analogue to Glauber dynamics that is (i) exactly detailed balanced, (ii) efficiently implementable, and (iii) quasi-local for geometrically local systems. Physically, their construction resembles the dissipative dynamics arising from weak system-bath interaction. In this work, we give an efficiently implementable discrete-time counterpart to any continuous-time quantum Gibbs sampler. Our construction preserves the desirable features (i)-(iii) while does not decrease the spectral gap. Also, we give an alternative highly coherent quantum generalization of detailed balanced dynamics that resembles another physically derived master equation, and propose a smooth interpolation between this and earlier constructions. Moreover, we show how to make earlier Metropolis-style Gibbs samplers (which estimate energies both before and after jumps) exactly detailed balanced. We study generic properties of all constructions, including the uniqueness of the fixed point, the (quasi-)locality of the resulting operators. Finally, we prove that the spectral gap of our new highly coherent Gibbs sampler is constant at high temperatures, thereby it mixes fast. We hope that our systematic approach to quantum Glauber and Metropolis dynamics will lead to widespread applications in various domains.