Thermal State Simulation with Pauli and Majorana Propagation
Abstract
We introduce a propagation-based approach to thermal state simulation by adapting Pauli and Majorana propagation to imaginary-time evolution in the Schr\"odinger picture. Our key observation is that high-temperature states can be sparse in the Pauli or Majorana bases, approaching the identity at infinite temperature. By formulating imaginary-time evolution directly in these operator bases and evolving from the maximally mixed state, we access a continuum of temperatures where the state remains efficiently representable. We provide analytic guarantees for small-coefficient truncation and Pauli-weight (Majorana-length) truncation strategies by quantifying the error growth and the impact of backflow. Large-scale numerics on the 1D J1-J2 model (energies) and the triangular-lattice Hubbard model (static correlations) validate efficiency at high temperatures.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.04878,
title = {Thermal State Simulation with Pauli and Majorana Propagation},
author = {Manuel S. Rudolph and Armando Angrisani and Andrew Wright and Iwo Sanderski and Ricard Puig and Zoë Holmes},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.04878},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
34 pages, 5 figues