Optimal detection of dissipation in Lindbladian dynamics

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Cai, Yiyi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Cai, Yiyi
author_facet Cai, Yiyi
contents Experimental implementations of Hamiltonian dynamics are often affected by dissipative noise arising from interactions with the environment. This raises the question of whether one can detect the presence or absence of such dissipation using only access to the observed time evolution of the system. We consider the following decision problem: given black-box access to the time-evolution channels $e^{t\mathcal{L}}$ generated by an unknown time-independent Lindbladian $\mathcal{L}$, determine whether the dynamics are purely Hamiltonian or contain dissipation of magnitude at least $ε$ in normalized Frobenius norm. We give a randomized procedure that solves this task using total evolution time $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-1})$, which is information-theoretically optimal. This guarantee holds under the assumptions that the Lindblad generator has bounded strength and its dissipative part is of constant locality with bounded degree. Our work provides a practical method for detecting dissipative noise in experimentally implemented quantum dynamics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_17736
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
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spellingShingle Optimal detection of dissipation in Lindbladian dynamics
Cai, Yiyi
Quantum Physics
Data Structures and Algorithms
Experimental implementations of Hamiltonian dynamics are often affected by dissipative noise arising from interactions with the environment. This raises the question of whether one can detect the presence or absence of such dissipation using only access to the observed time evolution of the system. We consider the following decision problem: given black-box access to the time-evolution channels $e^{t\mathcal{L}}$ generated by an unknown time-independent Lindbladian $\mathcal{L}$, determine whether the dynamics are purely Hamiltonian or contain dissipation of magnitude at least $ε$ in normalized Frobenius norm. We give a randomized procedure that solves this task using total evolution time $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-1})$, which is information-theoretically optimal. This guarantee holds under the assumptions that the Lindblad generator has bounded strength and its dissipative part is of constant locality with bounded degree. Our work provides a practical method for detecting dissipative noise in experimentally implemented quantum dynamics.
title Optimal detection of dissipation in Lindbladian dynamics
topic Quantum Physics
Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17736