Dissipative preparation of many-body quantum states: Toward practical quantum advantage

Abstract

While dissipation has traditionally been viewed as an obstacle to quantum coherence, it is increasingly recognized as a powerful computational resource. Dissipative protocols can prepare complex many-body quantum states by leveraging engineered system–environment interactions. This essay focuses on a class of algorithms that utilize algorithmically constructed Lindblad generators and highlight recent advances enabling the preparation of ground and thermal states for certain non-commuting Hamiltonians with rigorous performance guarantees. We also propose extensions of these protocols to prepare excited and resonance states, which may offer new pathways toward realizing practical quantum advantage on early fault-tolerant quantum computing platforms.