Dissipative phase decision without ground-state preparation

Abstract

We propose a dynamical approach to identifying ground-state quantum phases through short-time dissipative cooling. Rather than determining the phase by preparing highly accurate approximations to ground states, we prepare a representative state of a candidate phase and monitor the early-time response of phase-sensitive observables under cooling dynamics tailored to the target Hamiltonian. For a class of phase-decision problems in which the relevant observables can be inferred from the low-energy manifold, and with jump operators implementable using only short-time Hamiltonian simulation, the dissipative evolution rapidly suppresses high-energy components and drives the system into a low-energy manifold whose observables already reveal the underlying ground-state phase, well before mixing to the steady state. We demonstrate this strategy for the frustrated $J_1$--$J_2$ Heisenberg chain, the Kitaev honeycomb model, and the XXZ chain, including Berezinskii--Kosterlitz--Thouless and topological phase transitions. In particular, coarse filter resolutions and short evolution times suffice to recover phase-sensitive quantities such as the Luttinger parameter and topological diagnostics. We further provide theoretical justification that cooling dynamics with such jump operators can rigorously prepare low-energy manifolds for free-fermionic and free-bosonic systems, and investigate this mechanism for interacting fermionic systems. Our results suggest that phase decision is a plausible target for future utility-scale studies on early fault-tolerant quantum devices.