Dissipative cooling for ground-state preparation

Probing ground states of many-body systems is a central goal of quantum simulators and quantum processors. A promising approach to quantum state preparation is to engineer dissipative dynamics whose steady state corresponds to the desired correlated state. Here, we propose a kind of quantum algorithms for ground-state preparation based on system–bath interactions. By carefully designing both the bath and the interaction Hamiltonians, we show that the steady state of the dynamics accurately approximates the target ground state. Our method works for arbitrary initial system states (tolerant to imperfect preparation), remains robust to measurement errors in the bath, and applies to a wide range of many-body systems.