Overcoming the Lamb Shift in System-Bath Interaction Models via KMS Detailed Balance: High-Accuracy Thermalization with Time-Bounded Interactions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that engineering system-bath interactions satisfying KMS detailed balance enables high-accuracy thermal state preparation in quantum systems, even with non-commuting Lamb shift terms.

Contribution

It proves that KMS detailed balance ensures Gibbs state convergence in weak-coupling regimes for a broad class of dissipative dynamics, extending beyond standard Lindbladians.

Findings

Unique fixed point approaches Gibbs state arbitrarily closely in weak-coupling limit.

Mixing time bound of order epsilon^{-1} for Gibbs state preparation.

Guarantees apply to Hamiltonians with fast-mixing KMS-detailed-balance Lindbladians.

Abstract

We investigate quantum thermal state preparation algorithms based on system-bath interactions and uncover a surprising phenomenon in the weak-coupling regime. We rigorously prove that, if the system-bath interaction is engineered so that the transition part of the approximate Lindbladian generator satisfies the Kubo--Martin--Schwinger (KMS) detailed balance condition, then the unique fixed point of the dynamics can be made arbitrarily close to the Gibbs state in the weak-coupling limit, regardless of the structure of the Lamb shift term. Importantly, this remains true even when the approximate Lindbladian differs substantially from the ideal Davies generator and the Lamb shift term does not commute with the thermal state. Our result shows that the role of the KMS detailed balance condition extends well beyond standard Lindbladian dynamics, serving as a general principle for a broader class of dissipative systems. Furthermore, by combining this with a general perturbation framework, we bound the mixing time of the dynamics and establish an end-to-end complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-1})$ for Gibbs state preparation. These guarantees apply to any Hamiltonian whose associated KMS-detailed-balance Lindbladian is known to be fast mixing.