A Variational Quantum Algorithm for Preparing Quantum Gibbs States

Understand

Preparation of Gibbs distributions is an important task for quantum computation.

• It is a necessary first step in some types of quantum simulations and further is essential for quantum algorithms such as quantum Boltzmann training.
• Despite this, most methods for preparing thermal states are impractical to implement on near-term quantum computers because of the memory overheads required.
• Here we present a variational approach to preparing Gibbs states that is based on minimizing the free energy of a quantum system.