Adiabatic preparation of thermal states and entropy-noise relation on noisy quantum computers

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Granet, Etienne, Dreyer, Henrik
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Granet, Etienne
Dreyer, Henrik
author_facet Granet, Etienne
Dreyer, Henrik
contents We consider the problem of preparing thermal equilibrium states at finite temperature on quantum computers. Assuming thermalization, we show that states that are locally at thermal equilibrium can be prepared by evolving adiabatically an initial thermal Gibbs state of a simple Hamiltonian with an interpolating time-dependent Hamiltonian, identically to adiabatic ground state preparation. We argue that the entropy density of local density matrices is conserved during the adiabatic evolution in the thermodynamic limit, so that both the entropy and energy of the final state can be computed, and thus the final temperature too. We show that in the presence of hardware noise, the entropy created by the noisy evolution can be precisely benchmarked with mirror circuits. We give numerical evidence that the resulting thermal state preparation protocol is noise-resilient for depolarizing noise, in the sense that the energy-temperature curve measured on a noisy quantum computer is remarkably insensitive to the amplitude of depolarizing noise in the state preparation. We finally propose a protocol to estimate the lack of adiabaticity in a given actual Trotter implementation of the dynamics. We test our protocol on Quantinuum's H1-1 ion-trap device. We measure that a circuit with $640$ two-qubit gates implemented on hardware generates an entropy per site of $0.166 \pm 0.0045$, giving a benchmark metric for this state preparation. We report the preparation of a thermal state with temperature $2.56 \pm 0.26$ of the Ising model in size $5\times 4$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_05206
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adiabatic preparation of thermal states and entropy-noise relation on noisy quantum computers
Granet, Etienne
Dreyer, Henrik
Quantum Physics
We consider the problem of preparing thermal equilibrium states at finite temperature on quantum computers. Assuming thermalization, we show that states that are locally at thermal equilibrium can be prepared by evolving adiabatically an initial thermal Gibbs state of a simple Hamiltonian with an interpolating time-dependent Hamiltonian, identically to adiabatic ground state preparation. We argue that the entropy density of local density matrices is conserved during the adiabatic evolution in the thermodynamic limit, so that both the entropy and energy of the final state can be computed, and thus the final temperature too. We show that in the presence of hardware noise, the entropy created by the noisy evolution can be precisely benchmarked with mirror circuits. We give numerical evidence that the resulting thermal state preparation protocol is noise-resilient for depolarizing noise, in the sense that the energy-temperature curve measured on a noisy quantum computer is remarkably insensitive to the amplitude of depolarizing noise in the state preparation. We finally propose a protocol to estimate the lack of adiabaticity in a given actual Trotter implementation of the dynamics. We test our protocol on Quantinuum's H1-1 ion-trap device. We measure that a circuit with $640$ two-qubit gates implemented on hardware generates an entropy per site of $0.166 \pm 0.0045$, giving a benchmark metric for this state preparation. We report the preparation of a thermal state with temperature $2.56 \pm 0.26$ of the Ising model in size $5\times 4$.
title Adiabatic preparation of thermal states and entropy-noise relation on noisy quantum computers
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05206