Efficient simulation of non-trivial dissipative spin chains via stochastic unraveling

Abstract

We present a new technique for efficiently simulating (in polynomial time) a class of one-dimensional (1D) dissipative spin chains that, when mapped to fermions, have quadratic Hamiltonians, with the only nonlinearity coming from Jordan-Wigner strings appearing in the jump operators, despite the fact that these models cannot be mapped to quadratic fermionic master equations. We show that many such Lindblad master equations admit an exact stochastic unraveling, with individual trajectories evolving as Gaussian fermionic states, even though the full master equation describes a system inequivalent to free fermions. This allows one to calculate arbitrary observables efficiently without sign problems, and with bounded sampling complexity. We utilize this new technique to study three paradigmatic dissipative effects: the melting of antiferromagnetic order in the presence of local loss, many-body subradiant phenomenon in systems with correlated loss, and nonequilibrium steady states of a 1D dissipative transverse-field Ising model. Beyond simply providing a powerful numerical technique, our method can also be used to gain both qualitative and quantitative insights into the role of interactions in these models.