Efficient Algorithms for Approximating Quantum Partition Functions

We establish a polynomial-time approximation algorithm for partition functions of quantum spin models at high temperature. Our algorithm is based on the quantum cluster expansion of Netocný and Redig and the cluster expansion approach to designing algorithms due to Helmuth, Perkins, and Regts. Similar results have previously been obtained by related methods, and our main contribution is a simple and slightly sharper analysis for the case of pairwise interactions on bounded-degree graphs.