Quantum Simulation of Dissipative Energy Transfer via Noisy Quantum Computer

Abstract

We study whether dissipative energy-transfer dynamics can be simulated on noisy near-term quantum hardware by treating device noise as a calibrated resource rather than purely as an error source. Focusing on a biased exciton dimer, we encode the single-excitation manifold into a two-qubit subspace and implement the coherent dynamics through a shallow Trotterized propagator, while repeated noisy identity operations provide an effective dissipative channel. We benchmark the resulting short-time population dynamics against the hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM), which serves as a numerically accurate reference for the corresponding open-system model. On IBM quantum hardware, the calibrated noisy circuit reproduces a broad range of dissipative trajectories in the tested regime, and the fitted HEOM parameters exhibit an approximately linear dependence on the noisy-gate frequency. This empirical relation enables a practically useful interpolation strategy: once calibrated by a finite set of HEOM calculations, the noisy circuit can replace repeated HEOM fitting for intermediate parameter points within the same biased-dimer family. To extend the dynamics beyond the circuit-depth limit, we combine the short-time quantum data with the transfer tensor method (TTM). In simulator studies, TTM accurately extends the dynamics well beyond the directly simulated window, whereas on real hardware its performance is limited by the instability of coherence-sensitive initial states. Our results show that noisy few-qubit devices can act as calibrated phenomenological simulators of open-system dynamics and, within a restricted but experimentally relevant regime, can provide a practical surrogate for repeated HEOM-based modeling.