Estimating Gibbs partition function with quantum Clifford sampling

The partition function is an essential quantity in statistical mechanics, and its accurate computation is a key component of any statistical analysis of quantum system and phenomenon. However, for interacting many-body quantum systems, its calculation generally involves summing over an exponential number of terms and can thus quickly grow to be intractable. Accurately and efficiently estimating the partition function of its corresponding system Hamiltonian then becomes the key in solving quantum many-body problems. In this paper we develop a hybrid quantumclassical algorithm to estimate the partition function, utilising a novel Clifford sampling technique. Note that previous works on quantum estimation of partition functions require O(1/ε√∆)-depth quantum circuits [17, 23], where ∆ is the minimum spectral gap of stochastic matrices and ε is the multiplicative error. Our algorithm requires only a shallow O(1)-depth quantum circuit, repeated O(n/ε2) times, to provide a comparable ε approximation. Shallow-depth quantum circuits are considered vitally important for currently available NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) devices.

"Spectrally gapped" random walks on networks: a Mean First Passage Time formula

We derive an approximate but explicit formula for the Mean First Passage Time of a random walker between a source and a target node of a directed and weighted network. The formula does not require any matrix inversion, and it takes as only input the transition probabilities into the target node. It is derived from the calculation of the average resolvent of a deformed ensemble of random sub-stochastic matrices H=\langle H\rangle +\delta HH=⟨H⟩+δH, with \langle H\rangle⟨H⟩ rank-11 and non-negative. The accuracy of the formula depends on the spectral gap of the reduced transition matrix, and it is tested numerically on several instances of (weighted) networks away from the high sparsity regime, with an excellent agreement.

The Koopman Representation and Positive Rokhlin Entropy

In this paper, we study connections between positive entropy phenomena and the Koopman representation for actions of general countable groups. Following the line of work initiated by Hayes for sofic entropy, we show in a certain precise manner that all positive entropy must come from portions of the Koopman representation that embed into the left-regular representation. We conclude that for actions having completely positive outer entropy, the Koopman representation must be isomorphic to the countable direct sum of the left-regular representation. This generalizes a theorem of Dooley–Golodets for countable amenable groups. As a final consequence, we observe that actions with completely positive outer entropy must be mixing, and when the group is non-amenable they must be strongly ergodic and have spectral gap.