Dissipation accelerates quantum and classical simulation of open-system dynamics

Abstract

Simulating open quantum systems reveals how environmental coupling shapes relaxation, excitation transport, and the dynamics of quantum correlations. On quantum hardware, dissipative channels add operations and might seem to increase cost. However, we show that a broad class of Pauli noise, including depolarization, can ease quantum and classical simulation by exponentially suppressing high-weight components of Heisenberg-evolved observables. For bounded-degree Lindblad dynamics, this permits system-size-independent Trotter steps when estimating local observables. Combining this compression with Richardson extrapolation, we provide classical and quantum error bounds with respect to the 2-norm of the propagated observable. These give high-probability expectation-value guarantees for random input states or random Hamiltonians acting on a fixed state and control (out-of-time-order) correlators. Concretely, we show that expectation values of local observables at time $t$ can be estimated to accuracy $\varepsilon$ using circuits of maximum depth $O\!\left(\left[1+\left(t/\gamma\right)^{3/2}\right]\log^2(1/\varepsilon)\right)$, independent of the system size $n$. Classically, we show that sparse Pauli propagation runs in time polynomial in $n$, $t$ and $1/\varepsilon$ for every fixed $\gamma>0$, with polynomial degree $O(1/\gamma)$ in the weak dissipation limit. The gap between our quantum and classical upper bounds leaves room for a substantial polynomial quantum advantage as dissipation weakens, an observation further supported by our numerical results.