Wave Matrix Lindbladization I: Quantum Programs for Simulating Markovian Dynamics

Density Matrix Exponentiation is a technique for simulating Hamiltonian dynamics when the Hamiltonian to be simulated is available as a quantum state. In this paper, we present a natural analogue to this technique, for simulating Markovian dynamics governed by the well known Lindblad master equation. For this purpose, we first propose an input model in which a Lindblad operator $L$ is encoded into a quantum state $ψ$. Then, given access to $n$ copies of the state $ψ$, the task is to simulate the corresponding Markovian dynamics for time $t$. We propose a quantum algorithm for this task, called Wave Matrix Lindbladization, and we also investigate its sample complexity. We show that our algorithm uses $n = O(t^2/\varepsilon)$ samples of $ψ$ to achieve the target dynamics, with an approximation error of $O(\varepsilon)$.