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Daniel Stilck França

Publications and source records attributed to Daniel Stilck França.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Compilation-informed probabilistic logical-error cancellation

The potential of quantum computers to outperform classical ones in practically useful tasks remains challenging in the near term due to scaling limitations and high error rates of current quantum hardware. While quantum error correction (QEC) offers a clear path towards fault tolerance, overcoming the scalability issues will take time. Early applications will likely rely on QEC combined with quantum error mitigation (QEM). We introduce a QEM scheme against both compilation errors and logical-gate noise that is circuit-, QEC code-, and compiler-agnostic. The scheme builds on quasi-probability methods and uses information about the circuit's gates' compilations to attain an unbiased estimation of noiseless expectation values incurring a constant sample-complexity overhead. Moreover, it features maximal circuit size and code distance both independent of the target precision, in contrast to strategies based on QEC alone. We formulate the mitigation procedure as a linear program, demonstrate its efficacy through numerical simulations, and illustrate it for estimating the Jones polynomials of knots. Our method significantly reduces quantum resource requirements for high-precision estimations, offering a practical route towards fault-tolerant quantum computation with precision-independent overheads for fixed circuit size and code distance.

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Quantum Gibbs State Preparation via Relative Decoding: From Fast-Mixing Sources to Broader Target Classes

Provable guarantees for preparing quantum Gibbs states, such as rapid mixing or gapped coherent preparation paths, are known only for restricted Hamiltonian families and usually must be re-derived for each new family. Building on homomorphic polynomial transduction, a generalization of decoded quantum interferometry (DQI) and Hamiltonian DQI (HDQI), we show how relative decoding transfers such a guarantee from a source Hamiltonian $H_A$ to a target $H_B$. Writing each Hamiltonian as a sum of $m$ Pauli terms, the subsets of terms whose product is proportional to the identity, its relations, form a binary linear code, $K_A$ for the source and $K_B$ for the target, with the Pauli-label matrix as parity-check matrix as in DQI. Starting from the canonical thermofield double (TFD) of $H_A$, a Bell transform, a reversible label map, and a coherent decoder for the quotient code $K_B/K_A$ prepare an approximate TFD of $H_B$, and hence its Gibbs state. Because this decoder only resolves target relations absent from the source, the reachable inverse temperature is set by the relative distance $d_{\rm rel}$, the fewest terms in any such relation. It can far exceed the ordinary distance $d_{\rm ord}$, the fewest terms in any target relation, which bounds the uniform exact decoding radius of DQI and HDQI. We show that linear $d_{\rm rel}$ with efficient decoding at linear radius certifies a constant inverse temperature. As an example, starting from a nearest-neighbor spin chain whose TFD is known to be preparable at every finite temperature, a sparse classical parity-check matrix yields bounded-degree, geometrically nonlocal, noncommuting targets with $d_{\rm ord}=3$ and $d_{\rm rel}=Θ(m)$. To our knowledge, this gives a new class of efficiently preparable TFDs.

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Robust Structure Learning of $k$-local Lindbladians

We present an efficient protocol for learning an unknown $k$-local Lindblad generator on $n$ qubits using only product-state preparations, short-time evolution, and single-qubit Pauli measurements, without prior knowledge of the interaction structure. For fixed $k$ and a supplied weighted interaction-strength bound $\barα$, the protocol estimates all Hamiltonian and dissipative Pauli--GKSL coefficients with total coefficient error at each site at most $\varepsilon$ with probability at least $1-δ$ using $\widetilde{\mathcal O}_k(\barα^2n^{2k-2}\varepsilon^{-2}\log(n/δ))$ samples and polylogarithmically many distinct evolution times. This guarantee requires no degree, sparsity, or tail promise. A convex optimization converts these estimates into a valid $k$-local Lindblad generator with diamond-norm error at most $\varepsilon$ using $\widetilde{\mathcal O}_k(\barα^2n^{2k}\varepsilon^{-2}\log(n/δ))$ samples and polynomial-time classical postprocessing. With a supplied local effective-sparsity bound $r$ and a sufficiently small sitewise subthreshold tail $\mathcal O_k(\varepsilon)$, coefficient recovery requires only $\widetilde{\mathcal O}_k(\barα^2r^2\varepsilon^{-2}\log(n/δ))$ samples, without a supplied threshold or coefficient locations and without a coefficient-gap assumption. In particular, exactly sparse bounded-degree models have logarithmic sample dependence on $n$. We also provide guard-band support recovery and complementary supplied-candidate guarantees, extend the guarantees to model misspecification, and prove complementary sample-complexity lower bounds.

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Improved Adaptive Estimation of Quantum Partition Functions with Heisenberg Scaling

We give quantum algorithms that estimate the log partition function of an $n$-qubit quantum Hamiltonian to additive error $ε$ with Heisenberg scaling, while minimizing calls to thermal-state purification preparation. The input is a block encoding of $H$, unitaries preparing thermofield-double states at chosen inverse temperatures, with their inverses and controlled versions, and an adaptive slowly-varying cooling schedule. The system-size bounds below assume $0\preceq H\preceq hI$ with $h=O(n)$ and block-encoding normalization $α=Θ(h)$. For constant inverse temperature, we show that such a schedule of length $O(\sqrt n)$ always exists and can be generated from overlap estimates with $\widetilde O(\sqrt n)$ further preparations. Given such a schedule and classically chosen temperatures, we estimate the log partition function with $\widetilde O(n^{5/4}/ε)$ expected calls to state preparation and to the block encoding, improving by $n^{1/4}$ on non-adaptive strategies. To achieve our result, we use a recursive-doubling identity that expresses each schedule increment as a weighted sum of logarithms of thermofield-double overlaps and of short imaginary-time steps implemented by quantum singular value transformation combined with previously developed variance reduction techniques. If thermofield doubles can be prepared controlled on a temperature register, a quantum inverse-binomial log estimator combined with quantum mean estimation reduces both query counts to $\widetilde O(n/ε)$. We show that the latter scaling is optimal in block-encoding queries up to polylogarithmic factors and discuss end-to-end complexities for one-dimensional partition-function estimation.

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Fast convergence of propagation algorithms for open quantum systems

We establish general conditions for the rapid convergence of propagation algorithms for computing expectation values of local observables in quantum many-body systems, covering both spin and fermionic systems. Our results apply to evolutions that are sufficiently contractive, providing a general mechanism by which contractivity controls the growth generated by local interactions and enables efficient classical simulation. As a first application, we consider noisy time evolution generated by local Hamiltonians on arbitrary interaction graphs. We show that the dynamics can be efficiently simulated when the noise strength $λ$ is sufficiently large compared to the degree of the interaction graph. More generally, for systems with an interaction strength $u$, our bounds determine a time horizon $t_{\text{max}}$ as a function of the interaction strength $u$, the noise strength $λ$, and the interaction structure below which the algorithm is efficient. In the noiseless limit, $λ=0$, our analysis extends the efficiently simulable time scale from $\log(1/u)$ proved in Facelli, Fawzi, and Fawzi (2026) to $t_{\text{max}} \sim 1/u$ matching the recent improvement by Zhao, Marvian and Tong (2026). As a second application, we apply the same framework to the computation of local observables in Gibbs states of local Hamiltonians. We consider a pseudo-Lindbladian whose steady state is the Gibbs state and show that, at sufficiently high temperature, its propagation algorithm converges rapidly. In particular, for weakly-interacting systems with interaction strength $u$, our result applies up to inverse temperatures $β\sim\log(1/u)$.

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Hamiltonian dynamics from pure dissipation

The fundamental difference between closed and open quantum dynamics lies in their environmental interaction: closed systems are perfectly isolated and evolve reversibly under unitary Hamiltonian dynamics, whereas open systems continuously couple to an external bath, resulting in irreversible dissipation and information loss. In this work, we show internal Hamiltonian dynamics can be "faked`` via external pure dissipation, i.e., Lindbladians without a coherent Hamiltonian part. More concretely, we show that, in a GKSL representation with zero explicit Hamiltonian term but nontraceless jump operators, bounded-norm dissipative generators can approximate Hamiltonian dynamics within $ε$ error in diamond norm using $\mathcal{O}(t^2/ε)$ evolution time. We further prove that for time-independent dynamics this $\mathcal{O}(t^2/ε)$ scaling is in the worst case, necessary and optimal from a geometric perspective, which captures the fundamental decoherence cost for catching up with the speed of Hamiltonian dynamics. Our construction leads to various implications, including the BQP-completeness of purely dissipative dynamics even before reaching approximate equilibrium, a Zeno-adjacent state-independent freezing effect, the no super-quadratic fast-forwarding theorem of a class of purely dissipative dynamics, and reducing Lindbladian simulation cost via gauge changing.

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Rapid mixing of Gibbs samplers via quantum Dobrushin--Shlosman conditions

Classical Dobrushin--Shlosman theory uses heat-bath block updates to identify sharp temperature thresholds for establishing the rapid mixing of Gibbs samplers. In particular, these mixing guarantees often hold even when stricter single-site conditions fail. We extend this approach to noncommuting quantum lattice systems through a quantum Dobrushin--Shlosman condition for finite-block dynamics, which we call smoothed heat-bath dynamics. We establish this condition in two regimes. For finite-range quantum spin chains at every fixed finite temperature, we prove logarithmic trace-norm mixing in system size, with normalized bounds uniform in on-site fields and single exponential in inverse temperature. We also prove stability under small local perturbations of interacting, possibly noncommuting reference Hamiltonians on graphs of polynomial volume growth. For classical references with bounded local interactions, uniform strong spatial mixing implies our quantum condition. With bounded local terms and fixed physical, geometric and block parameters, the resulting samplers prepare Gibbs states to trace-norm error $\varepsilon$ using $N\operatorname{polylog}(N/\varepsilon)$ gates and classical operations. Our block updates combine a local Gibbs reset with quantum belief propagation to incorporate interactions across the block boundary, yielding exactly Gibbs-preserving, KMS-reversible channels. Two independently tunable parameters control contraction: an internal evolution time suppresses the influence of sites inside a block, while the block size allows interior contraction to dominate boundary influence. This finite-time relaxation has no counterpart in a classical heat-bath block update.

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Learning Local Fermionic Lindbladians under Parity Superselection

Parity superselection forbids direct measurement of odd Majorana observables. We learn time-independent, parity-covariant, $k$-mode-local Lindbladians on $m$ modes using even preparations and measurements with uninterrupted short-time evolution. Internal markers turn odd probes into even observables, and pair measurements among three separated markers calibrate their dynamical contributions. Signed Fierz inversion recovers canonical coefficients, while semidefinite fitting yields a valid generator. For finite-range models on known bounded-degree graphs with suitable marker access and a supplied weighted-strength bound $\barα$, entrywise error $\varepsilon$ is achieved using $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\barα^2\varepsilon^{-2}\log(m/δ))$ samples, without external modes or known nonzero coefficient locations. Recovery to diamond-norm error $\varepsilon$ costs an additional factor $m^2$, matching lower bounds for short-time experiments on fresh systems up to logarithmic and fixed geometric factors. Without a supplied graph, one idle ancillary mode per system mode and potentially nonlocal pair operations give total absolute coefficient error at most $\varepsilon$ per mode using $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}_k(\barα^2\mathsf d^2m^{\lfloor k/2\rfloor}\varepsilon^{-2}\log(m/δ))$ samples, under a supplied approximate coefficient-degree bound $\mathsf d$ and controlled weak-coefficient tails. All guarantees hold with probability at least $1-δ$. For geometric models, fixed-support even observables can be predicted with logarithmic system-size sample complexity at fixed time and accuracy. We also give finite-volume and exponential-tail extensions.

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From Simple Sources to Quantum Advantage: Homomorphic Polynomial Transduction via Relative Decoding

Decoded quantum interferometry (DQI) and its Hamiltonian extension (HDQI) prepare states whose amplitudes are low-degree polynomials of an objective, using Fourier transforms and coherent decoding. We recast this approach as quantum state transduction through algebra homomorphisms. We transfer an efficiently preparable operator state of a degree-$D$ polynomial in a source Hamiltonian $H_A$ to the corresponding polynomial state of a target Hamiltonian $H_B=π(H_A)$, where $π$ is a unital $*$-homomorphism between the finite-dimensional source and target $C^*$-algebras. The transduction uses operator Fourier transforms and relative decoding to recover source operators rather than individual term-selection labels. The relative distance $d_{\mathrm{rel}}$ is the first degree at which source and target traces disagree. We prove that $2D<d_{\mathrm{rel}}$ is equivalent to preserving all inner products between degree-$D$ polynomials. Moreover, $d_{\mathrm{rel}}\ge d_{\mathrm{ord}}$, where $d_{\mathrm{ord}}$ is the ordinary distance used in (H)DQI, and we give families with $d_{\mathrm{ord}}=O(1)$ but $d_{\mathrm{rel}}=Θ(n)$ and efficient decoders. Our framework replaces the complicated pilot state preparation by the more modular task of preparing a source polynomial state. DQI and HDQI arise as relation-free special cases. The framework accommodates nonuniform coefficients and noncommuting interactions and extends to fermionic, qudit, and bosonic systems, with applications to approximate optimization and Gibbs sampling. As evidence of advantages, for a nonlinear pairwise variant of optimal polynomial intersection where constant $d_{\mathrm{ord}}$ limits DQI-style preparations, relative decoding yields an ideal quantum score of 0.643 versus 0.606 for the best tested classical heuristic, a gap exceeding 3 percentage points.

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Bounded-Error Quantum Simulation via Hamiltonian and Lindbladian Learning

Analog Quantum Simulators offer a route to exploring strongly correlated many-body dynamics beyond classical computation, but their predictive power remains limited by the absence of quantitative error estimation. Establishing rigorous uncertainty bounds is essential for elevating such devices from qualitative demonstrations to quantitative scientific tools. Here we introduce a general framework for bounded-error quantum simulation, which provides predictions for many-body observables with experimentally quantifiable uncertainties. The approach combines Hamiltonian and Lindbladian Learning--a statistically rigorous inference of the coherent and dissipative generators governing the dynamics--with the propagation of their uncertainties into the simulated observables, yielding confidence bounds directly derived from experimental data. We demonstrate this framework on trapped-ion quantum simulators implementing long-range Ising interactions with up to 51 ions, and validate it where classical comparison is possible. We analyze error bounds on two levels. First, we learn an open-system model from experimental data collected in an initial time window of quench dynamics, simulate the corresponding master equation, and quantitatively verify consistency between theoretical predictions and measured dynamics at long times. Second, we establish error bounds directly from experimental measurements alone, without relying on classical simulation--crucial for entering regimes of quantum advantage. The learned models reproduce the experimental evolution within the predicted bounds, demonstrating quantitative reliability and internal consistency. Bounded-error quantum simulation provides a scalable foundation for trusted analog quantum computation, bridging the gap between experimental platforms and predictive many-body physics. The techniques presented here directly extend to digital quantum simulation.

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Noise-induced shallow circuits and absence of barren plateaus

Motivated by realistic hardware considerations of the pre-fault-tolerant era, we comprehensively study the impact of uncorrected noise on quantum circuits. We first show that in the task of estimating observable expectation values any noise truncates most quantum circuits to effectively logarithmic depth. We then prove that quantum circuits under any non-unital noise do not exhibit barren plateaus for cost functions composed of local observables. However, by using the effective shallowness, we also design an efficient classical algorithm to estimate observable expectation values within any constant additive accuracy, with high probability over the choice of the circuit, in any circuit architecture. Taken together, our results establish that, unless we carefully engineer quantum circuits to take advantage of the noise, noisy quantum circuits are unlikely to offer an advantage over shallow ones for algorithms that output observable expectation value estimates, such as many variational quantum machine learning proposals.

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Efficient Hamiltonian, structure and trace distance learning of Gaussian states

In this work, we initiate the study of Hamiltonian learning for positive temperature bosonic Gaussian states, the quantum generalization of the widely studied problem of learning Gaussian graphical models. We obtain efficient protocols, both in sample and computational complexity, for the task of inferring the parameters of their underlying quadratic Hamiltonian under the assumption of bounded temperature, squeezing, displacement and maximal degree of the interaction graph. Our protocol only requires heterodyne measurements, which are often experimentally feasible, and has a sample complexity that scales logarithmically with the number of modes. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to learn the underlying interaction graph in a similar setting and sample complexity. In addition, we use our techniques to obtain the first results on learning Gaussian states in trace distance with a quadratic scaling in precision and polynomial in the number of modes, albeit imposing certain restrictions on the Gaussian states. Our main technical innovations are several continuity bounds for the covariance and Hamiltonian matrix of a Gaussian state, which are of independent interest, combined with what we call the local inversion technique. In essence, the local inversion technique allows us to reliably infer the Hamiltonian of a Gaussian state by only estimating in parallel submatrices of the covariance matrix whose size scales with the desired precision, but not the number of modes. This way we bypass the need to obtain precise global estimates of the covariance matrix, controlling the sample complexity.

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Pairwise Liouvillian learning from randomized measurements: practical aspects and guidelines for operating the protocol in large-scale experiments

We review and numerically study a protocol for Liouvillian learning based on randomized Pauli states and measurements. In particular, in the two-body, long-range interactions, and single-body noise setting, we describe the complete workflow to obtain the coefficients of the Liouvillian in an efficient and pairwise manner, meaning that the required classical memory is independent of the system size. We also provide guidelines for choosing the parameters for data acquisition and postprocessing that minimize the total reconstruction error.

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Efficient thermalization and universal quantum computing with quantum Gibbs samplers

The preparation of thermal states of matter is a crucial task in quantum simulation. In this work, we prove that a recently introduced, efficiently implementable dissipative evolution thermalizes to the Gibbs state in time scaling polynomially with system size at high enough temperatures for any Hamiltonian that satisfies a Lieb-Robinson bound, such as local Hamiltonians on a lattice. Furthermore, we show the efficient adiabatic preparation of the associated purifications or ``thermofield double'' states. These results establish the efficient preparation of high-temperature Gibbs states and their purifications. In the low-temperature regime, we show that implementing this family of dissipative evolutions for inverse temperatures polynomial in the system's size is computationally equivalent to polynomial time quantum computations. On a technical level, for high temperatures, our proof makes use of the mapping of the generator of the evolution into a Hamiltonian, and then connecting its convergence to that of the infinite temperature limit. For low temperature, we instead perform a perturbation at zero temperature and resort to circuit-to-Hamiltonian mappings akin to the proof of universality of quantum adiabatic computing. Taken together, our results show that a family of quasi-local dissipative evolutions efficiently prepares a large class of quantum many-body states of interest, and has the potential to mirror the success of classical Monte Carlo methods for quantum many-body systems.

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Sampling (noisy) quantum circuits through randomized rounding

The present era of quantum processors with hundreds to thousands of noisy qubits has sparked interest in understanding the computational power of these devices and how to leverage it to solve practically relevant problems. For applications that require estimating expectation values of observables the community developed a good understanding of how to simulate them classically and denoise them. Certain applications, like combinatorial optimization, however demand more than expectation values: the bit-strings themselves encode the candidate solutions. While recent impossibility and threshold results indicate that noisy samples alone rarely beat classical heuristics, we still lack classical methods to replicate those noisy samples beyond the setting of random quantum circuits. Focusing on problems whose objective depends only on two-body correlations such as Max-Cut, we show that Gaussian randomized rounding in the spirit of Goemans-Williamson applied to the circuit's two-qubit marginals-produces a distribution whose expected cost is provably close to that of the noisy quantum device. For instance, for Max-Cut problems we show that for any depth-D circuit affected by local depolarizing noise p, our sampler achieves an approximation ratio $1-O[(1-p)^D]$, giving ways to efficiently sample from a distribution that behaves similarly to the noisy circuit for the problem at hand. Beyond theory we run large-scale simulations and experiments on IBMQ hardware, confirming that the rounded samples faithfully reproduce the full energy distribution, and we show similar behaviour under other various noise models. Our results supply a simple classical surrogate for sampling noisy optimization circuits, clarify the realistic power of near-term hardware for combinatorial tasks, and provide a quantitative benchmark for future error-mitigated or fault-tolerant demonstrations of quantum advantage.

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Demonstrating and Benchmarking Classical Shadows for Lindblad Tomography

Spurious couplings and decoherence degrade the performance of solid-state quantum processors, demanding careful design, calibration, and mitigation protocols. These strategies often rely on characterization of the idling processor, but tomographic recovery of (time-independent) Lindblad dynamics scales exponentially with qubit count. Here, we experimentally benchmark and demonstrate that randomized ("shadow") measurements accelerate Lindblad tomography on a superconducting transmon processor. We first implement extensible Lindblad tomography, which estimates Lindblad parameters using a complete tomographic dataset, and use it as a baseline to benchmark a shadow tomography approach, shadow Lindblad tomography. The shadow approach recycles randomized configurations to estimate the same Lindblad parameters using far fewer resources under physically motivated locality assumptions. We experimentally verify these assumptions in our processor by implementing the protocols on one- and three-qubit subsystems; here, shadow Lindblad tomography reproduces extensible Lindblad tomography within uncertainties while using exponentially fewer configurations. Leveraging this efficiency, we apply shadow Lindblad tomography to the full five-qubit processor and recover all single qubit dissipation and two-qubit coupling parameters in 9 hours of acquisition time compared to an estimated 58 hours for extensible Lindblad tomography. Additionally, our shadow implementation is compatible with conventional Gaussian error propagation, avoiding the use of median-of-means estimators. Together, these results demonstrate how randomized shadow tomography protocols can be practically implemented to learn quantum processor dynamics at an increasing qubit count.

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Optimal quantum algorithm for Gibbs state preparation

It is of great interest to understand the thermalization of open quantum many-body systems, and how quantum computers are able to efficiently simulate that process. A recently introduced disispative evolution, inspired by existing models of open system thermalization, has been shown to be efficiently implementable on a quantum computer. Here, we prove that, at high enough temperatures, this evolution reaches the Gibbs state in time scaling logarithmically with system size. The result holds for Hamiltonians that satisfy the Lieb-Robinson bound, such as local Hamiltonians on a lattice, and includes long-range systems. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first results rigorously establishing the rapid mixing property of high-temperature quantum Gibbs samplers, which is known to give the fastest possible speed for thermalization in the many-body setting. We then employ our result to the problem of estimating partition functions at high temperature, showing an improved performance over previous classical and quantum algorithms.

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Polynomial-time thermalization and Gibbs sampling from system-bath couplings

Many physical phenomena, including thermalization in open quantum systems and quantum Gibbs sampling, are modeled by Lindbladians approximating a system weakly coupled to a bath. Understanding the convergence speed of these Lindbladians to their steady states is crucial for bounding algorithmic runtimes and thermalization timescales. We study two such families of processes: one characterizing a repeated-interaction Gibbs sampling algorithm, and another modeling open many-body quantum thermalization. We prove that both converge in polynomial time for several non-commuting systems, including high-temperature local lattices, weakly interacting fermions, and 1D spin chains. These results demonstrate that simple dissipative quantum algorithms can prepare complex Gibbs states and that Lindblad dynamics accurately capture thermal relaxation. Our proofs rely on a novel technical result that extrapolates spectral gap lower bounds from quasi-local Lindbladians to the non-local generators governing these dynamics.

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