A quantum algorithm for the direct estimation of the steady state of open quantum systems

Understand

Simulating the dynamics and the non-equilibrium steady state of an open quantum system are hard computational tasks on conventional computers.

• For the simulation of the time evolution, several efficient quantum algorithms have recently been developed.
• However, computing the non-equilibrium steady state as the long-time limit of the system dynamics is often not a viable solution, because of exceedingly long transient features or strong quantum correlations in the dynamics.
• Here, we develop an efficient quantum algorithm for the direct estimation of averaged expectation values of observables on the non-equilibrium steady state, thus bypassing the time integration of the master equation.