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Rapid Quantum Ground State Preparation via Dissipative Dynamics

Yongtao Zhan1,2,*, Zhiyan Ding3,*, Jakob Huhn4,3, Johnnie Gray5, John Preskill1,2,6, Garnet Kin-Lic Chan1,5, and Lin Lin3,7,†

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †Contact author: linlin@math.berkeley.edu
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Phys. Rev. X 16, 011004 – Published 6 January, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/wzb3-dbg9

Abstract

Inspired by natural cooling processes, dissipation has become a promising approach for preparing low-energy states of quantum systems. However, the potential of dissipative protocols remains unclear beyond certain commuting Hamiltonians. This work provides significant analytical and numerical insights into the power of dissipation for preparing the ground state of noncommuting Hamiltonians. For quasi-free dissipative dynamics, including certain 1D spin systems with boundary dissipation, our results reveal a new connection between the mixing time in trace distance and the spectral properties of a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, leading to an explicit and sharp bound on the mixing time that scales polynomially with system size. For more general spin systems, we develop a tensor network-based algorithm for constructing the Lindblad jump operator and for simulating the dynamics. Using this algorithm, we demonstrate numerically that dissipative ground state preparation protocols can achieve rapid mixing for certain 1D local Hamiltonians under bulk dissipation, with a mixing time that scales logarithmically with the system size. We then prove the rapid mixing result for certain weakly interacting spin and fermionic systems in arbitrary dimensions, extending recent results for high-temperature quantum Gibbs samplers to the zero-temperature regime. Together, these results show that dissipation can be a powerful tool for ground state preparation, with potential applications across condensed matter physics, quantum materials science, and beyond.

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The search for the ground state and other low-energy states is critical in physics and chemistry because these states determine the behavior of materials and molecules. We study engineered dissipation, a technique inspired by natural cooling, to prepare these challenging quantum states, particularly in systems where different parts of the Hamiltonian do not commute. We develop new analytical methods and a tensor-network simulation algorithm to evaluate the efficiency of this cooling process for complex systems. Our findings show that this dissipative method is highly effective, as the cooling time scales either polynomially or, in some cases, even logarithmically with the system size for many physical systems. These results establish dissipation as a powerful and robust strategy for preparing quantum states, making it attractive for implementation on early fault-tolerant quantum devices.

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Phys. Rev. X 16, 011004– Published 6 January, 2026
  • Received 4 April 2025
  • Revised 2 September 2025
  • Accepted 7 November 2025
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