Quantum Hamiltonian complexity in thermal equilibrium

The physical properties of a quantum many-body system in thermal equilibrium are determined by its partition function and free energy. Here we study the computational complexity of approximating these quantities for n-qubit local Hamiltonians. First, we report a classical algorithm with poly(n) runtime, which approximates the free energy of a given 2-local Hamiltonian provided that it satisfies a certain denseness condition. Our algorithm contributes to a body of work investigating the hardness of approximation for difficult optimization problems. Specifically, this extends existing efficient approximation algorithms for dense instances of the ground energy of 2-local quantum Hamiltonians and the free energy of classical Ising models. Second, we establish polynomial-time equivalence between the problem of approximating the free energy of local Hamiltonians and several other natural tasks ubiquitous in condensed-matter physics and quantum computing, such as the problem of approximating the number of input states accepted by a polynomial-size quantum circuit. These results suggest that the simulation of quantum many-body systems in thermal equilibrium may precisely capture the complexity of a broad family of computational problems that have yet to be defined or characterized in terms of known complexity classes. Finally, we summarize state-of-the-art classical and quantum algorithms for approximating the free energy and show how to improve their runtime and memory footprint.