Variational quantum thermalization of environment-coupled DNA sequence biases

A variational quantum thermalizer for environment-coupled DNA oligomers (N=2–5 base pairs) enriches target-sequence probabilities by 9.85–62.77 at β=1, matching exact-Gibbs trends.

• Why it matters: It addresses how environmental thermal conditions could bias the equilibrium statistical weight of specific genomic configurations, linking molecular energies to sequence-level observables.
• What they did: DNA is modeled as an open quantum system coupled to a thermal bosonic bath, with interaction energies parameterized from prescribed nucleotide sequences; both classical Gibbs-state optimization and a nine-layer VQT are run at β=1 with 200 outer evaluations.
• The result: Exact-Gibbs optimization boosts target probabilities by 9.11, 25.64, 54.51, and 159.87 versus uniform sequences, and VQT-selected Hamiltonians agree highly for shorter oligomers but show increased sensitivity to variational thermal approximation as size grows.

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