Algorithmic Cooling of a Quantum Simulator

Controlled quantum mechanical devices provide a means of simulating more complex quantum systems exponentially faster than classical computers. Such "quantum simulators" rely heavily upon being able to prepare the ground state of Hamiltonians, whose properties can be used to calculate correlation functions or even the solution to certain classical computations. While adiabatic preparation remains the primary means of producing such ground states, here we provide a different avenue of preparation: cooling to the ground state via simulated dissipation. This is in direct analogy to contemporary efforts to realize generalized forms of simulated annealing in quantum systems.