Environmental records unlock universal quantum computation from thermal decoherence

Abstract

At a fixed thermal exposure, the same stabilizer processor can be classically simulable or quantum universal, depending on which environmental records its controller retains. We give an exact computational classification of energy-counting thermal-idle instruments in a quantum processor with ideal stabilizer control and independent local Markov baths. The relaxation time $T_1$, homogeneous coherence time $T_2$, and equilibrium excited-state population $p_e$ determine an exact computational boundary at $(1-p_e)T_2/T_1=1$. If every location lies at or below it, branchwise nonnegative stabilizer decompositions give an explicit efficient classical sampler for the adaptive circuit and its full time-resolved exchange record. Above it at a single repeatedly accessible location, a suitable idle duration and no-exchange conditioning supply distillable ancillas and enable universal quantum computation with polynomial overhead. At finite temperature on the resource side, erasing the record at a sufficiently long, unsplit exposure makes the averaged channel stabilizer measure-and-prepare, and even a terminal parity check then yields only simulable branches. Yet at that same exposure, retaining only the bit recording whether any exchange occurred still heralds distillable ancillas, because a thermal round trip restores the parity after its first exchange has already removed the coherence.