English

Quasi-locality and efficient simulation of Markovian quantum dynamics

Quantum Physics 2012-08-10 v2 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We consider open many-body systems governed by a time-dependent quantum master equation with short-range interactions. With a generalized Lieb-Robinson bound, we show that the evolution in this very generic framework is quasi-local, i.e., the evolution of observables can be approximated by implementing the dynamics only in a vicinity of the observables' support. The precision increases exponentially with the diameter of the considered subsystem. Hence, the time-evolution can be simulated on classical computers with a cost that is independent of the system size. Providing error bounds for Trotter decompositions, we conclude that the simulation on a quantum computer is additionally efficient in time. For experiments and simulations, our result can be used to rigorously bound finite-size effects.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1111.4210,
  title  = {Quasi-locality and efficient simulation of Markovian quantum dynamics},
  author = {Thomas Barthel and Martin Kliesch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1111.4210},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

5 pages + 2 pages appendix, 2 figures; minor improvements; published version

R2 v1 2026-06-21T19:37:47.728Z