Boltzmann distributions on a quantum computer via active cooling

Quantum computing raises the possibility of solving a variety of problems in physics that are presently intractable. A number of such problems involves the physics of systems in or near thermal equilibrium. There are two main ways to compute thermal expectation values on a quantum computer: construct a thermal state that reproduces thermal expectation values, or sample various energy eigenstates from a Boltzmann distribution of a given temperature. In this paper we address the second approach and propose an algorithm that uses active cooling to produce the distribution. While this algorithm is quite general and applicable to a wide variety of systems, it was developed with the specific intention of simulating thermal configurations of non-Abelian gauge theories such as QCD, which would allow the study of quark-gluon plasma created in heavy-ion collisions.