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On quantum to classical comparison for Davies generators

Probability

Speaker: June Vuong, UC Berkeley
Related Webpage: https://thuyduongvuong.github.io/index.html
Location: 2112 MSB
Start time: Thu, Oct 2 2025, 11:00AM

Despite extensive study, our understanding of quantum Markov chains remains far less complete than that of their classical counterparts. [Temme '13] observed that the Davies Lindbladian, a well-studied model of quantum Markov dynamics, contains an embedded classical Markov generator, raising the natural question of how the convergence properties of the quantum and classical dynamics compare. While [Temme '13] showed that the spectral gap of the Davies Lindbladian can be exponentially smaller than that of the embedded classical generator for certain highly structured Hamiltonians, we show that if the spectrum of the Hamiltonian does not contain long arithmetic progressions, then the two spectral gaps must be comparable. As a consequence, we prove that for a large class of Hamiltonians, including those obtained by perturbing a fixed Hamiltonian with a generic external field, the quantum spectral gap remains within a constant factor of the classical spectral gap. Our result aligns with physical intuition and enables the application of classical Markov chain techniques to the quantum setting.