Preparing thermal states on noiseless and noisy programmable quantum processors

Nature is governed by precise physical laws, which can inspire the discovery of new computer-run simulation algorithms. Thermal states are the most ubiquitous for they are the equilibrium states of matter. Simulating thermal states of quantum matter has applications ranging from quantum machine learning to better understanding of high-temperature superconductivity and quantum chemistry. The computational complexity of this task is hopelessly hard for classical computers. The existing quantum algorithms come with caveats: most either require quantum phase estimation rendering them impractical for current noisy hardware, or are variational which face obstacles such as initialization, barren plateaus, and a general lack of provable guarantee. We provide two quantum algorithms with provable guarantees to prepare thermal states on (near-term) quantum computers that avoid these drawbacks. The first algorithm is inspired by the natural thermalization process where the ancilla qubits act as the infinite thermal bath. This algorithm can potentially run in polynomial time to sample thermal distributions of ergodic systems - the vast class of physical systems that equilibrate in isolation with respect to local observables. The second algorithm works for any system and in general runs in exponential time. However, it requires significantly smaller quantum resources than previous such algorithms. In addition, we provide an error mitigation technique for both algorithms to fight back decoherence, which enables us to run our algorithms on the near-term quantum devices. To illustration, we simulate the thermal state of the hardcore Bose-Hubbard model on the latest generation of available quantum computers.