A rapidly mixing quantum Swendsen–Wang sampler and a locality lower bound for Gibbs sampling

I study the mixing time of quantum Gibbs samplers (Davies / Chen– Kastoryano–Gilyén generators) at low temperature. I prove a locality lower bound: any local, KMS–detailed-balanced sampler whose target has an order- parameter bottleneck has an Arrhenius-small spectral gap, by a quantum Cheeger argument, and hence mixing time eΩ(β∆F). The bound is a quantum Cheeger argument and holds for every KMS–detailed-balanced sampler. The coherence cannot lift an order-parameter bottleneck, thereby the obstruction survives quantization. It is not, however, intrinsic to the target. I give a 3-local, detailed-balanced Lindbladian on an enlarged spin+bond register whose spin marginal realizes the Fortuin–Kasteleyn cluster update and which, for commuting ferromagnets, has an inverse-polynomial gap at every temperature and prepares σ in poly(n)log(1/ε) gates. This gives an unconditional separation from the local-reversible class in which locality (not coherence) is the operative resource. As a conjecture, I isolate the genuinely quantum question about cluster updates for noncommuting targets, where no nonnegative bond representation exists and the cluster must be grown coherently.