Adiabatic preparation of thermal states and entropy-noise relation on noisy quantum computers (2509.05206v1)

Abstract: We consider the problem of preparing thermal equilibrium states at finite temperature on quantum computers. Assuming thermalization, we show that states that are locally at thermal equilibrium can be prepared by evolving adiabatically an initial thermal Gibbs state of a simple Hamiltonian with an interpolating time-dependent Hamiltonian, identically to adiabatic ground state preparation. We argue that the entropy density of local density matrices is conserved during the adiabatic evolution, so that both the entropy and energy of the final state can be computed, and thus the final temperature too. We show that in the presence of hardware noise, the entropy created by the noisy evolution can be evaluated with mirror circuits. We give numerical evidence that the resulting thermal state preparation protocol is noise-resilient, in the sense that the energy-temperature curve measured on a noisy quantum computer is remarkably insensitive to noise. We finally propose a protocol to estimate the lack of adiabaticity in a given actual Trotter implementation of the dynamics. We test our protocol on Quantinuum's H1-1 ion-trap device. We measure that a circuit with $640$ two-qubit gates implemented on hardware generates an entropy per site of $0.166 \pm 0.0045$, giving a benchmark metric for this state preparation. We report the preparation of a thermal state with temperature $2.56 \pm 0.26$ of the Ising model in size $5\times 4$.