Entanglement entropy scaling transition under competing monitoring protocols - Mathias Van Regemortel; Ze-Pei Cian; Alireza Seif; Hossein Dehghani; Mohammad Hafezi (2020)
Dissipation generally leads to the decoherence of a quantum state. In contrast, numerous recent proposals have illustrated that dissipation can also be tailored to stabilize many-body entangled quantum states. While the focus of these works has been primarily on engineering the non-equilibrium steady state, we investigate the build-up of entanglement in the quantum trajectories. Specifically, we analyze the competition between two different dissipation channels arising from two incompatible continuous monitoring protocols. The first protocol locks the phase of neighboring sites upon registering a quantum jump, thereby generating a long-range entanglement through the system, while the second one destroys the coherence via dephasing mechanism. By studying the unraveling of stochastic quantum trajectories associated with the continuous monitoring protocols, we present a transition for the scaling of the averaged trajectory entanglement entropies, from critical scaling to area-law behavior. Our work provides novel insights into the occurrence of a measurement-induced phase transition within a continuous monitoring protocol.

Exotic photonic molecules via Lennard-Jones-like potentials - Przemyslaw Bienias; Michael Gullans; Marcin Kalinowski; Alexander N. Craddock; Dalia P. Ornelas-Huerta; Steven L. Rolston; J. V. Porto; Alexey V. Gorshkov (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2020)
Ultracold systems offer an unprecedented level of control of interactions between atoms. An important challenge is to achieve a similar level of control of the interactions between photons. Towards this goal, we propose a realization of a novel Lennard-Jones-like potential between photons coupled to the Rydberg states via electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). This potential is achieved by tuning Rydberg states to a Förster resonance with other Rydberg states. We consider few-body problems in 1D and 2D geometries and show the existence of self-bound clusters ("molecules") of photons. We demonstrate that for a few-body problem, the multi-body interactions have a significant impact on the geometry of the molecular ground state. This leads to phenomena without counterparts in conventional systems: For example, three photons in 2D preferentially arrange themselves in a line-configuration rather than in an equilateral-triangle configuration. Our result opens a new avenue for studies of many-body phenomena with strongly interacting photons.

Experimental Low-Latency Device-Independent Quantum Randomness - Yanbao Zhang; Lynden K. Shalm; Joshua C. Bienfang; Martin J. Stevens; Michael D. Mazurek; Sae Woo Nam; Carlos Abellán; Waldimar Amaya; Morgan W. Mitchell; Honghao Fu; Carl Miller; Alan Mink; et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2020)
Applications of randomness such as private key generation and public randomness beacons require small blocks of certified random bits on demand. Device-independent quantum random number generators can produce such random bits, but existing quantum-proof protocols and loophole-free implementations suffer from high latency, requiring many hours to produce any random bits. We demonstrate device-independent quantum randomness generation from a loophole-free Bell test with a more efficient quantum-proof protocol, obtaining multiple blocks of 512 bits with an average experiment time of less than 5 min per block and with certified error bounded by 2−64≈5.42×10−20.

An exponential ramp in the quadratic Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model - Michael Winer; Shao-Kai Jian; Brian Swingle (2020)
A long period of linear growth in the spectral form factor provides a universal diagnostic of quantum chaos at intermediate times. By contrast, the behavior of the spectral form factor in disordered integrable many-body models is not well understood. Here we study the two-body Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and show that the spectral form factor features an exponential ramp, in sharp contrast to the linear ramp in chaotic models. We find a novel mechanism for this exponential ramp in terms of a high-dimensional manifold of saddle points in the path integral formulation of the spectral form factor. This manifold arises because the theory enjoys a large symmetry group. With finite nonintegrable interaction strength, these delicate symmetries reduce to a relative time translation, causing the exponential ramp to give way to a linear ramp.

Fault-Tolerant Operation of a Quantum Error-Correction Code - Laird Egan; Dripto M. Debroy; Crystal Noel; Andrew Risinger; Daiwei Zhu; Debopriyo Biswas; Michael Newman; Muyuan Li; Kenneth R. Brown; Marko Cetina; Christopher Monroe (2020)
Quantum error correction protects fragile quantum information by encoding it in a larger quantum system whose extra degrees of freedom enable the detection and correction of errors. An encoded logical qubit thus carries increased complexity compared to a bare physical qubit. Fault-tolerant protocols contain the spread of errors and are essential for realizing error suppression with an error-corrected logical qubit. Here we experimentally demonstrate fault-tolerant preparation, rotation, error syndrome extraction, and measurement on a logical qubit encoded in the 9-qubit Bacon-Shor code. For the logical qubit, we measure an average fault-tolerant preparation and measurement error of 0.6% and a transversal Clifford gate with an error of 0.3% after error correction. The result is an encoded logical qubit whose logical fidelity exceeds the fidelity of the entangling operations used to create it. We compare these operations with non-fault-tolerant protocols capable of generating arbitrary logical states, and observe the expected increase in error. We directly measure the four Bacon-Shor stabilizer generators and are able to detect single qubit Pauli errors. These results show that fault-tolerant quantum systems are currently capable of logical primitives with error rates lower than their constituent parts. With the future addition of intermediate measurements, the full power of scalable quantum error-correction can be achieved.

Feedback Induced Magnetic Phases in Binary Bose-Einstein Condensates - Hilary M. Hurst; Shangjie Guo; I. B. Spielman (2020)
Weak measurement in tandem with real-time feedback control is a new route toward engineering novel non-equilibrium quantum matter. Here we develop a theoretical toolbox for quantum feedback control of multicomponent Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) using backaction-limited weak measurements in conjunction with spatially resolved feedback. Feedback in the form of a single-particle potential can introduce effective interactions that enter into the stochastic equation governing system dynamics. The effective interactions are tunable and can be made analogous to Feshbach resonances -- spin-independent and spin-dependent -- but without changing atomic scattering parameters. Feedback cooling prevents runaway heating due to measurement backaction and we present an analytical model to explain its effectiveness. We showcase our toolbox by studying a two-component BEC using a stochastic mean-field theory, where feedback induces a phase transition between easy-axis ferromagnet and spin-disordered paramagnet phases. We present the steady-state phase diagram as a function of intrinsic and effective spin-dependent interaction strengths. Our result demonstrates that closed-loop quantum control of Bose-Einstein condensates is a powerful new tool for quantum engineering in cold-atom systems.

Fluctuations in Extractable Work Bound the Charging Power of Quantum Batteries - Luis Pedro García-Pintos; Alioscia Hamma; Adolfo del Campo (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2020)
We study the connection between the charging power of quantum batteries and the fluctuations of the stored work. We prove that in order to have a non-zero rate of change of the extractable work, the state ρW of the battery cannot be an eigenstate of a `work operator', defined by F ≡ HW + β−1log(ρW), where HW is the Hamiltonian of the battery and β is the inverse temperature of a reference thermal bath with respect to which the extractable work is calculated. We do so by proving that fluctuations in the stored work upper bound the charging power of a quantum battery. Our findings also suggest that quantum coherence in the battery enhances the charging process, which we illustrate on a toy model of a heat engine.

Gravitational Direct Detection of Dark Matter - Daniel Carney; Sohitri Ghosh; Gordan Krnjaic; J. M. Taylor (Phys. Rev. D, 2020)
The only coupling dark matter is guaranteed to have with the standard model is through gravity. Here we propose a concept for direct dark matter detection using only this gravitational coupling, enabling a new regime of detection. Leveraging dramatic advances in the ability to create, maintain, and probe quantum states of massive objects, we suggest that an array of quantum-limited impulse sensors may be capable of detecting the correlated gravitational force created by a passing dark matter particle. We present two concrete realizations of this scheme, using either mechanical resonators or freely-falling masses. With currently available technology, a meter-scale apparatus of this type could detect any dark matter candidate around the Planck mass or heavier.

Hierarchy of linear light cones with long-range interactions - Minh C. Tran; Chi-Fang Chen; Adam Ehrenberg; Andrew Y. Guo; Abhinav Deshpande; Yifan Hong; Zhe-Xuan Gong; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Andrew Lucas (Physical Review X, 2020)
In quantum many-body systems with local interactions, quantum information and entanglement cannot spread outside of a "linear light cone," which expands at an emergent velocity analogous to the speed of light. Yet most non-relativistic physical systems realized in nature have long-range interactions: two degrees of freedom separated by a distance r interact with potential energy V(r)∝1/rα. In systems with long-range interactions, we rigorously establish a hierarchy of linear light cones: at the same α, some quantum information processing tasks are constrained by a linear light cone while others are not. In one spatial dimension, commutators of local operators ⟨ψ|[Ox(t),Oy]|ψ⟩ are negligible in every state |ψ⟩ when |x−y|≳vt, where v is finite when α>3 (Lieb-Robinson light cone); in a typical state |ψ⟩ drawn from the infinite temperature ensemble, v is finite when α>52 (Frobenius light cone); in non-interacting systems, v is finite in every state when α>2 (free light cone). These bounds apply to time-dependent systems and are optimal up to subalgebraic improvements. Our theorems regarding the Lieb-Robinson and free light cones, and their tightness, also generalize to arbitrary dimensions. We discuss the implications of our bounds on the growth of connected correlators and of topological order, the clustering of correlations in gapped systems, and the digital simulation of systems with long-range interactions. In addition, we show that quantum state transfer and many-body quantum chaos are bounded by the Frobenius light cone, and therefore are poorly constrained by all Lieb-Robinson bounds.

Hilbert-Space Fragmentation from Strict Confinement - Zhi-Cheng Yang; Fangli Liu; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Thomas Iadecola (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2020)
We study one-dimensional spin-1/2 models in which strict confinement of Ising domain walls leads to the fragmentation of Hilbert space into exponentially many disconnected subspaces. Whereas most of the previous works emphasize dipole moment conservation as an essential ingredient for such fragmentation, we instead require two commuting U(1) conserved quantities associated with the total domain-wall number and the total magnetization. The latter arises naturally from the confinement of domain walls. Remarkably, while some connected components of the Hilbert space thermalize, others are integrable by Bethe ansatz. We further demonstrate how this Hilbert-space fragmentation pattern arises perturbatively in the confining limit of Z2 gauge theory coupled to fermionic matter, leading to a hierarchy of time scales for motion of the fermions. This model can be realized experimentally in two complementary settings.

The impossibility of efficient quantum weak coin flipping - Carl Miller (STOC 2020: Proceedings of the 52nd Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing, 2020)
How can two parties with competing interests carry out a fair coin flip across a quantum communication channel? This problem (quantum weak coin-flipping) was formalized more than 15 years ago, and, despite some phenomenal theoretical progress, practical quantum coin-flipping protocols with vanishing bias have proved hard to find. In the current work we show that there is a reason that practical weak quantum coin-flipping is difficult: any quantum weak coin-flipping protocol with bias є must use at least exp( Ω (1/√є )) rounds of communication. This is a large improvement over the previous best known lower bound of Ω ( log log(1/є )) due to Ambainis from 2004. Our proof is based on a theoretical construction (the two-variable profile function) which may find further applications.

Impossibility of Quantum Virtual Black-Box Obfuscation of Classical Circuits - Gorjan Alagic; Zvika Brakerski; Yfke Dulek; Christian Schaffner (2020)
Virtual black-box obfuscation is a strong cryptographic primitive: it encrypts a circuit while maintaining its full input/output functionality. A remarkable result by Barak et al. (Crypto 2001) shows that a general obfuscator that obfuscates classical circuits into classical circuits cannot exist. A promising direction that circumvents this impossibility result is to obfuscate classical circuits into quantum states, which would potentially be better capable of hiding information about the obfuscated circuit. We show that, under the assumption that learning-with-errors (LWE) is hard for quantum computers, this quantum variant of virtual black-box obfuscation of classical circuits is generally impossible. On the way, we show that under the presence of dependent classical auxiliary input, even the small class of classical point functions cannot be quantum virtual black-box obfuscated.

Information scrambling at finite temperature in local quantum systems - Subhayan Sahu; Brian Swingle (2020)
This paper investigates the temperature dependence of quantum information scrambling in local systems with an energy gap, m, above the ground state. We study the speed and shape of growing Heisenberg operators as quantified by out-of-time-order correlators, with particular attention paid to so-called contour dependence, i.e. dependence on the way operators are distributed around the thermal circle. We report large scale tensor network numerics on a gapped chaotic spin chain down to temperatures comparable to the gap which show that the speed of operator growth is strongly contour dependent. The numerics also show a characteristic broadening of the operator wavefront at finite temperature T. To study the behavior at temperatures much below the gap, we perform a perturbative calculation in the paramagnetic phase of a 2+1D O(N) non-linear sigma model, which is analytically tractable at large N. Using the ladder diagram technique, we find that operators spread at a speed T/m−−−−√ at low temperatures, T≪m. In contrast to the numerical findings of spin chain, the large N computation is insensitive to the contour dependence and does not show broadening of operator front. We discuss these results in the context of a recently proposed state-dependent bound on scrambling.

Information scrambling at finite temperature in local quantum systems - Subhayan Sahu; Brian Swingle (2020)
This paper investigates the temperature dependence of quantum information scrambling in local systems with an energy gap, m, above the ground state. We study the speed and shape of growing Heisenberg operators as quantified by out-of-time-order correlators, with particular attention paid to so-called contour dependence, i.e. dependence on the way operators are distributed around the thermal circle. We report large scale tensor network numerics on a gapped chaotic spin chain down to temperatures comparable to the gap which show that the speed of operator growth is strongly contour dependent. The numerics also show a characteristic broadening of the operator wavefront at finite temperature T. To study the behavior at temperatures much below the gap, we perform a perturbative calculation in the paramagnetic phase of a 2+1D O(N) non-linear sigma model, which is analytically tractable at large N. Using the ladder diagram technique, we find that operators spread at a speed T/m−−−−√ at low temperatures, T≪m. In contrast to the numerical findings of spin chain, the large N computation is insensitive to the contour dependence and does not show broadening of operator front. We discuss these results in the context of a recently proposed state-dependent bound on scrambling.

Limits on Classical Simulation of Free Fermions with Dissipation - Oles Shtanko; Abhinav Deshpande; Paul S. Julienne; Alexey V. Gorshkov (2020)
Free-fermionic systems are a valuable, but limited, class of many-body problems efficiently simulable on a classical computer. We examine how classical simulability of noninteracting fermions is modified in the presence of Markovian dissipation described by quadratic Lindblad operators, including, for example, incoherent transitions or pair losses. On the one hand, we establish three broad classes of Markovian dynamics that are efficiently simulable classically, by devising efficient algorithms. On the other hand, we demonstrate that, in the worst case, simulating Markovian dynamics with quadratic Lindblad operators is at least as hard as simulating universal quantum circuits. This result is applicable to an experimentally relevant setting in cold atomic systems, where magnetic Feshbach resonances can be used to engineer the desired dissipation. For such systems, our hardness result provides a direct scheme for dissipation-assisted quantum computing with a potential significant advantage in the speed of two-qubit gates and, therefore, in error tolerance.

Localization and criticality in antiblockaded 2D Rydberg atom arrays - Fangli Liu; Zhi-Cheng Yang; Przemyslaw Bienias; Thomas Iadecola; Alexey V. Gorshkov (2020)
Controllable Rydberg atom arrays have provided new insights into fundamental properties of quantum matter both in and out of equilibrium. In this work, we study the effect of experimentally relevant positional disorder on Rydberg atoms trapped in a 2D square lattice under anti-blockade (facilitation) conditions. We show that the facilitation conditions lead the connectivity graph of a particular subspace of the full Hilbert space to form a 2D Lieb lattice, which features a singular flat band. Remarkably, we find three distinct regimes as the disorder strength is varied: a critical regime, a delocalized but nonergodic regime, and a regime with a disorder-induced flat band. The critical regime's existence depends crucially upon the singular flat band in our model, and is absent in any 1D array or ladder system. We propose to use quench dynamics to probe the three different regimes experimentally.

Machine learning the thermodynamic arrow of time - Alireza Seif; Mohammad Hafezi; Christopher Jarzynski (Nat. Phys., 2020)
The mechanism by which thermodynamics sets the direction of time's arrow has long fascinated scientists. Here, we show that a machine learning algorithm can learn to discern the direction of time's arrow when provided with a system's microscopic trajectory as input. The performance of our algorithm matches fundamental bounds predicted by nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. Examination of the algorithm's decision-making process reveals that it discovers the underlying thermodynamic mechanism and the relevant physical observables. Our results indicate that machine learning techniques can be used to study systems out of equilibrium, and ultimately to uncover physical principles.

Many-Body Dephasing in a Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulator - Harvey B. Kaplan; Lingzhen Guo; Wen Lin Tan; Arinjoy De; Florian Marquardt; Guido Pagano; Christopher Monroe (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2020)
How a closed interacting quantum many-body system relaxes and dephases as a function of time is a fundamental question in thermodynamic and statistical physics. In this work, we observe and analyse the persistent temporal fluctuations after a quantum quench of a tunable long-range interacting transverse-field Ising Hamiltonian realized with a trapped-ion quantum simulator. We measure the temporal fluctuations in the average magnetization of a finite-size system of spin-1/2 particles and observe the experimental evidence for the theoretically predicted regime of many-body dephasing. We experiment in a regime where the properties of the system are closely related to the integrable Hamiltonian with global spin-spin coupling, which enables analytical predictions even for the long-time non-integrable dynamics. We find that the measured fluctuations are exponentially suppressed with increasing system size, consistent with theoretical predictions.

Mechanical Quantum Sensing in the Search for Dark Matter - D. Carney; G. Krnjaic; D. C. Moore; C. A. Regal; G. Afek; S. Bhave; B. Brubaker; T. Corbitt; J. Cripe; N. Crisosto; A.Geraci; S. Ghosh; et al. (2020)
Numerous astrophysical and cosmological observations are best explained by the existence of dark matter, a mass density which interacts only very weakly with visible, baryonic matter. Searching for the extremely weak signals produced by this dark matter strongly motivate the development of new, ultra-sensitive detector technologies. Paradigmatic advances in the control and readout of massive mechanical systems, in both the classical and quantum regimes, have enabled unprecedented levels of sensitivity. In this white paper, we outline recent ideas in the potential use of a range of solid-state mechanical sensing technologies to aid in the search for dark matter in a number of energy scales and with a variety of coupling mechanisms.

Minimal model for fast scrambling - Ron Belyansky; Przemyslaw Bienias; Yaroslav A. Kharkov; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Brian Swingle (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2020)
We study quantum information scrambling in spin models with both long-range all-to-all and short-range interactions. We argue that a simple global, spatially homogeneous interaction together with local chaotic dynamics is sufficient to give rise to fast scrambling, which describes the spread of quantum information over the entire system in a time that is logarithmic in the system size. This is illustrated in two exactly solvable models: (1) a random circuit with Haar random local unitaries and a global interaction and (2) a classical model of globally coupled non-linear oscillators. We use exact numerics to provide further evidence by studying the time evolution of an out-of-time-order correlator and entanglement entropy in spin chains of intermediate sizes. Our results can be verified with state-of-the-art quantum simulators.

More of the Bulk from Extremal Area Variations - Ning Bao; ChunJun Cao; Sebastian Fischetti; Jason Pollack; Yibo Zhong (Classical and Quantum Gravity, 2020)
It was shown recently, building on work of Alexakis, Balehowksy, and Nachman that the geometry of (some portion of) a manifold with boundary is uniquely fixed by the areas of a foliation of two-dimensional disk-shaped surfaces anchored to the boundary. In the context of AdS/CFT, this implies that (a portion of) a four-dimensional bulk geometry can be fixed uniquely from the entanglement entropies of disk-shaped boundary regions, subject to several constraints. In this Note, we loosen some of these constraints, in particular allowing for the bulk foliation of extremal surfaces to be local and removing the constraint of disk topology; these generalizations ensure uniqueness of more of the deep bulk geometry by allowing for e.g. surfaces anchored on disconnected asymptotic boundaries, or HRT surfaces past a phase transition. We also explore in more depth the generality of the local foliation requirement, showing that even in a highly dynamical geometry like AdS-Vaidya it is satisfied.

Nearly optimal time-independent reversal of a spin chain - Aniruddha Bapat; Eddie Schoute; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Andrew M. Childs (accepted for publication in Physical Review Research, 2020)
We propose a time-independent Hamiltonian protocol for the reversal of qubit ordering in a chain of N spins. Our protocol has an easily implementable nearest-neighbor, transverse-field Ising model Hamiltonian with time-independent, non-uniform couplings. Under appropriate normalization, we implement this state reversal three times faster than a naive approach using SWAP gates, in time comparable to a protocol of Raussendorf [Phys. Rev. A 72, 052301 (2005)] that requires dynamical control. We also prove lower bounds on state reversal by using results on the entanglement capacity of Hamiltonians and show that we are within a factor 1.502(1+1/N) of the shortest time possible. Our lower bound holds for all nearest-neighbor qubit protocols with arbitrary finite ancilla spaces and local operations and classical communication. Finally, we extend our protocol to an infinite family of nearest-neighbor, time-independent Hamiltonian protocols for state reversal. This includes chains with nearly uniform coupling that may be especially feasible for experimental implementation.

Noncommuting conserved charges in quantum many-body thermalization - Nicole Yunger Halpern; Michael E. Beverland; Amir Kalev (Phys. Rev. E, 2020)
In statistical mechanics, a small system exchanges conserved quantities—heat, particles, electric charge, etc.—with a bath. The small system thermalizes to the canonical ensemble or the grand canonical ensemble, etc., depending on the quantities. The conserved quantities are represented by operators usually assumed to commute with each other. This assumption was removed within quantum-information-theoretic (QI-theoretic) thermodynamics recently. The small system's long-time state was dubbed “the non-Abelian thermal state (NATS).” We propose an experimental protocol for observing a system thermalize to the NATS. We illustrate with a chain of spins, a subset of which forms the system of interest. The conserved quantities manifest as spin components. Heisenberg interactions push the conserved quantities between the system and the effective bath, the rest of the chain. We predict long-time expectation values, extending the NATS theory from abstract idealization to finite systems that thermalize with finite couplings for finite times. Numerical simulations support the analytics: The system thermalizes to near the NATS, rather than to the canonical prediction. Our proposal can be implemented with ultracold atoms, nitrogen-vacancy centers, trapped ions, quantum dots, and perhaps nuclear magnetic resonance. This work introduces noncommuting conserved quantities from QI-theoretic thermodynamics into quantum many-body physics: atomic, molecular, and optical physics and condensed matter.

Non-equilibrium fixed points of coupled Ising models - Jeremy T. Young; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Michael Foss-Feig; Mohammad F. Maghrebi (Phys. Rev. X, 2020)
Driven-dissipative systems can exhibit non-equilibrium phenomena that are absent in their equilibrium counterparts. However, phase transitions present in these systems generically exhibit an effectively classical equilibrium behavior in spite of their quantum non-equilibrium origin. In this paper, we show that multicritical points in driven-dissipative systems can give rise to genuinely non-equilibrium behavior. We investigate a non-equilibrium driven-dissipative model of interacting bosons that exhibits two distinct phase transitions: one from a high- to a low-density phase---reminiscent of a liquid-gas transition---and another to an antiferromagnetic phase. Each phase transition is described by the Ising universality class characterized by an (emergent or microscopic) Z2 symmetry. They, however, coalesce at a multicritical point giving rise to a non-equilibrium model of coupled Ising-like order parameters described by a Z2×Z2 symmetry. Using a dynamical renormalization-group approach, we show that a pair of non-equilibrium fixed points (NEFPs) emerge that govern the long-distance critical behavior of the system. We elucidate various exotic features of these NEFPs. In particular, we show that a generic continuous scale invariance at criticality is reduced to a discrete scale invariance. This further results in complex-valued critical exponents, spiraling phase boundaries, and a complex Liouvillian gap even close to the phase transition. As direct evidence of the non-equilibrium nature of the NEFPs, we show that the fluctuation-dissipation relation is violated at all scales, leading to an effective temperature that becomes "hotter" and "hotter" at longer and longer wavelengths. Finally, we argue that this non-equilibrium behavior can be observed in cavity arrays with cross-Kerr nonlinearities.

Non-equilibrium steady state phases of the interacting Aubry-Andre-Harper model - Yongchan Yoo; Junhyun Lee; Brian Swingle (2020)
Here we study the phase diagram of the Aubry-Andre-Harper model in the presence of strong interactions as the strength of the quasiperiodic potential is varied. Previous work has established the existence of many-body localized phase at large potential strength; here, we find a rich phase diagram in the delocalized regime characterized by spin transport and unusual correlations. We calculate the non-equilibrium steady states of a boundary-driven strongly interacting Aubry-Andre-Harper model by employing the time-evolving block decimation algorithm on matrix product density operators. From these steady states, we extract spin transport as a function of system size and quasiperiodic potential strength. This data shows spin transport going from superdiffusive to subdiffusive well before the localization transition; comparing to previous results, we also find that the transport transition is distinct from a transition observed in the speed of operator growth in the model. We also investigate the correlation structure of the steady state and find an unusual oscillation pattern for intermediate values of the potential strength. The unusual spin transport and quantum correlation structure suggest multiple dynamical phases between the much-studied thermal and many-body-localized phases.

Non-interactive classical verification of quantum computation - Gorjan Alagic; Andrew M. Childs; Alex B. Grilo; Shih-Han Hung (Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC), 2020)
In a recent breakthrough, Mahadev constructed an interactive protocol that enables a purely classical party to delegate any quantum computation to an untrusted quantum prover. In this work, we show that this same task can in fact be performed non-interactively and in zero-knowledge. Our protocols result from a sequence of significant improvements to the original four-message protocol of Mahadev. We begin by making the first message instance-independent and moving it to an offline setup phase. We then establish a parallel repetition theorem for the resulting three-message protocol, with an asymptotically optimal rate. This, in turn, enables an application of the Fiat-Shamir heuristic, eliminating the second message and giving a non-interactive protocol. Finally, we employ classical non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) arguments and classical fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to give a zero-knowledge variant of this construction. This yields the first purely classical NIZK argument system for QMA, a quantum analogue of NP. We establish the security of our protocols under standard assumptions in quantum-secure cryptography. Specifically, our protocols are secure in the Quantum Random Oracle Model, under the assumption that Learning with Errors is quantumly hard. The NIZK construction also requires circuit-private FHE.

A note on blind contact tracing at scale with applications to the COVID-19 pandemic - Jack K. Fitzsimons; Atul Mantri; Robert Pisarczyk; Tom Rainforth; Zhikuan Zhao (2020)
The current COVID-19 pandemic highlights the utility of contact tracing, when combined with case isolation and social distancing, as an important tool for mitigating the spread of a disease [1]. Contact tracing provides a mechanism of identifying individuals with a high likelihood of previous exposure to a contagious disease, allowing additional precautions to be put in place to prevent continued transmission. Here we consider a cryptographic approach to contact tracing based on secure two-party computation (2PC). We begin by considering the problem of comparing a set of location histories held by two parties to determine whether they have come within some threshold distance while at the same time maintaining the privacy of the location histories. We propose a solution to this problem using pre-shared keys, adapted from an equality testing protocol due to Ishai et al [2]. We discuss how this protocol can be used to maintain privacy within practical contact tracing scenarios, including both app-based approaches and approaches which leverage location history held by telecoms and internet service providers. We examine the efficiency of this approach and show that existing infrastructure is sufficient to support anonymised contact tracing at a national level.

On-demand indistinguishable single photons from an efficient and pure source based on a Rydberg ensemble - Dalia P. Ornelas-Huerta; Alexander N. Craddock; Elizabeth A. Goldschmidt; Andrew J. Hachtel; Yidan Wang; P. Bienias; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Steve L. Rolston; James V. Porto (2020)
Single photons coupled to atomic systems have shown to be a promising platform for developing quantum technologies. Yet a bright on-demand, highly pure and highly indistinguishable single-photon source compatible with atomic platforms is lacking. In this work, we demonstrate such a source based on a strongly interacting Rydberg system. The large optical nonlinearities in a blockaded Rydberg ensemble convert coherent light into a single-collective excitation that can be coherently retrieved as a quantum field. We observe a single-transverse-mode efficiency up to 0.18(2), g(2)=2.0(1.5)×10−4, and indistinguishability of 0.982(7), making this system promising for scalable quantum information applications. Accounting for losses, we infer a generation probability up to 0.40(4). Furthermore, we investigate the effects of contaminant Rydberg excitations on the source efficiency. Finally, we introduce metrics to benchmark the performance of on-demand single-photon sources.

One-shot dynamical resource theory - Xiao Yuan; Pei Zeng; Minbo Gao; Qi Zhao (2020)
A fundamental problem in resource theory is to study the manipulation of the resource. Focusing on a general dynamical resource theory of quantum channels, here we consider tasks of one-shot resource distillation and dilution with a single copy of the resource. For any target of unitary channel or pure state preparation channel, we establish a universal strategy to determine upper and lower bounds on rates that convert between any given resource and the target. We show that the rates are related to resource measures based on the channel robustness and the channel hypothesis testing entropy, with regularization factors of the target resource measures. The strategy becomes optimal with converged bounds when the channel robustness is finite and measures of the target resource collapse to the same value. The single-shot result also applies to asymptotic parallel manipulation of channels to obtain asymptotic resource conversion rates. We give several examples of dynamical resources, including the purity, classical capacity, quantum capacity, non-uniformity, coherence, and entanglement of quantum channels. Our results are applicable to general dynamical resource theories with potential applications in quantum communication, fault-tolerant quantum computing, and quantum thermodynamics.

The operator Lévy flight: light cones in chaotic long-range interacting systems - Tianci Zhou; Shenglong Xu; Xiao Chen; Andrew Guo; Brian Swingle (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2020)
We propose a generic light cone phase diagram for chaotic long-range r−α interacting systems, where a linear light cone appears for α≥d+1/2 in d dimension. Utilizing the dephasing nature of quantum chaos, we argue that the universal behavior of the squared commutator is described by a stochastic model, for which the exact phase diagram is known. We provide an interpretation in terms of the Lévy flights and show that this suffices to capture the scaling of the squared commutator. We verify these phenomena in numerical computation of a long-range spin chain with up to 200 sites.

Optical quantum memory with optically inaccessible noble-gas spins - Or Katz; Eran Reches; Roy Shaham; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Ofer Firstenberg (2020)
Optical quantum memories, which store and preserve the quantum state of photons, rely on a coherent mapping of the photonic state onto matter states that are optically accessible. Here we outline a new physical mechanism to map the state of photons onto the long-lived but optically inaccessible collective state of noble-gas spins. The mapping employs the coherent spin-exchange interaction arising from random collisions with alkali vapor. We analyze optimal strategies for high-efficiency storage and retrieval of non-classical light at various parameter regimes. Based on these strategies, we identify feasible experimental conditions for realizing efficient quantum memories with noble-gas spins having hours-long coherence times at room temperature and above

Optimal control for quantum detectors - Paraj Titum; Kevin M. Schultz; Alireza Seif; Gregory D. Quiroz; B. D. Clader (2020)
Quantum systems are promising candidates for sensing of weak signals as they can provide unrivaled performance when estimating parameters of external fields. However, when trying to detect weak signals that are hidden by background noise, the signal-to-noise-ratio is a more relevant metric than raw sensitivity. We identify, under modest assumptions about the statistical properties of the signal and noise, the optimal quantum control to detect an external signal in the presence of background noise using a quantum sensor. Interestingly, for white background noise, the optimal solution is the simple and well-known spin-locking control scheme. We further generalize, using numerical techniques, these results to the background noise being a correlated Lorentzian spectrum. We show that for increasing correlation time, pulse based sequences such as CPMG are also close to the optimal control for detecting the signal, with the crossover dependent on the signal frequency. These results show that an optimal detection scheme can be easily implemented in near-term quantum sensors without the need for complicated pulse shaping.

Optimal fermion-to-qubit mapping via ternary trees with applications to reduced quantum states learning - Zhang Jiang; Amir Kalev; Wojciech Mruczkiewicz; Hartmut Neven (Quantum, 2020)
We introduce a fermion-to-qubit mapping defined on ternary trees, where any single Majorana operator on an n-mode fermionic system is mapped to a multi-qubit Pauli operator acting nontrivially on ⌈log3(2n+1)⌉ qubits. The mapping has a simple structure and is optimal in the sense that it is impossible to construct Pauli operators in any fermion-to-qubit mapping acting nontrivially on less than log3(2n) qubits on average. We apply it to the problem of learning k-fermion reduced density matrix (RDM), a problem relevant in various quantum simulation applications. We show that using the ternary-tree mapping one can determine the elements of all k-fermion RDMs, to precision ϵ, by repeating a single quantum circuit for ≲(2n+1)kϵ−2 times. This result is based on a method we develop here that allows one to determine the elements of all k-qubit RDMs, to precision ϵ, by repeating a single quantum circuit for ≲3kϵ−2 times, independent of the system size. This improves over existing schemes for determining qubit RDMs.

Optimal Measurement of Field Properties with Quantum Sensor Networks - Timothy Qian; Jacob Bringewatt; Igor Boettcher; Przemyslaw Bienias; Alexey V. Gorshkov (2020)
We consider a quantum sensor network of qubit sensors coupled to a field f(x⃗ ;θ⃗ ) analytically parameterized by the vector of parameters θ⃗ . The qubit sensors are fixed at positions x⃗ 1,…,x⃗ d. While the functional form of f(x⃗ ;θ⃗ ) is known, the parameters θ⃗  are not. We derive saturable bounds on the precision of measuring an arbitrary analytic function q(θ⃗ ) of these parameters and construct the optimal protocols that achieve these bounds. Our results are obtained from a combination of techniques from quantum information theory and duality theorems for linear programming. They can be applied to many problems, including optimal placement of quantum sensors, field interpolation, and the measurement of functionals of parametrized fields.

Optimal Protocols in Quantum Annealing and QAOA Problems - Lucas T. Brady; Christopher L. Baldwin; Aniruddha Bapat; Yaroslav Kharkov; Alexey V. Gorshkov (2020)
Quantum Annealing (QA) and the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) are two special cases of the following control problem: apply a combination of two Hamiltonians to minimize the energy of a quantum state. Which is more effective has remained unclear. Here we apply the framework of optimal control theory to show that generically, given a fixed amount of time, the optimal procedure has the pulsed (or "bang-bang") structure of QAOA at the beginning and end but can have a smooth annealing structure in between. This is in contrast to previous works which have suggested that bang-bang (i.e., QAOA) protocols are ideal. Through simulations of various transverse field Ising models, we demonstrate that bang-anneal-bang protocols are more common. The general features identified here provide guideposts for the nascent experimental implementations of quantum optimization algorithms.

Optimal state transfer and entanglement generation in power-law interacting systems - Minh C. Tran; Abhinav Deshpande; Andrew Y. Guo; Andrew Lucas; Alexey V. Gorshkov (2020)
We present an optimal protocol for encoding an unknown qubit state into a multiqubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger-like state and, consequently, transferring quantum information in large systems exhibiting power-law (1/rα) interactions. For all power-law exponents α between d and 2d+1, where d is the dimension of the system, the protocol yields a polynomial speedup for α>2d and a superpolynomial speedup for α≤2d, compared to the state of the art. For all α>d, the protocol saturates the Lieb-Robinson bounds (up to subpolynomial corrections), thereby establishing the optimality of the protocol and the tightness of the bounds in this regime. The protocol has a wide range of applications, including in quantum sensing, quantum computing, and preparation of topologically ordered states.

Optimal Two-Qubit Circuits for Universal Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation - Andrew N. Glaudell; Neil J. Ross; J. M. Taylor (2020)
We study two-qubit circuits over the Clifford+CS gate set which consists of Clifford gates together with the controlled-phase gate CS=diag(1,1,1,i). The Clifford+CS gate set is universal for quantum computation and its elements can be implemented fault-tolerantly in most error-correcting schemes with magic state distillation. However, since non-Clifford gates are typically more expensive to perform in a fault-tolerant manner, it is desirable to construct circuits that use few CS gates. In the present paper, we introduce an algorithm to construct optimal circuits for two-qubit Clifford+CS operators. Our algorithm inputs a Clifford+CS operator U and efficiently produces a Clifford+CS circuit for U using the least possible number of CS gates. Because our algorithm is deterministic, the circuit it associates to a Clifford+CS operator can be viewed as a normal form for the operator. We give a formal description of these normal forms as walks over certain graphs and use this description to derive an asymptotic lower bound of 5log(1/epsilon)+O(1) on the number CS gates required to epsilon-approximate any 4x4 unitary matrix.

Parallel Device-Independent Quantum Key Distribution - Rahul Jain; Carl Miller; Yaoyun Shi (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2020)
A prominent application of quantum cryptography is the distribution of cryptographic keys that are provably secure. Such security proofs were extended by Vazirani and Vidick ( Physical Review Letters , 113, 140501, 2014) to the device-independent (DI) scenario, where the users do not need to trust the integrity of the underlying quantum devices. The protocols analyzed by them and by subsequent authors all require a sequential execution of N multiplayer games, where N is the security parameter. In this work, we prove the security of a protocol where all games are executed in parallel. Besides decreasing the number of time-steps necessary for key generation, this result reduces the security requirements for DI-QKD by allowing arbitrary information leakage of each user’s inputs within his or her lab. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first parallel security proof for a fully device-independent QKD protocol. Our protocol tolerates a constant level of device imprecision and achieves a linear key rate.

Position Space Decoherence From Long-Range Interaction With Background Gas - Jonathan Kunjummen; Daniel Carney; J. M. Taylor (Bulletin of the American Physical Society, 2020)
Experiments in matter wave interferometry and optomechanics are increasing the spatial extent of wavefunctions of massive quantum systems; this gives rise to new sources of decoherence that must be characterized. Here we calculate the position space decoherence of a quantum particle due to interaction with a fluctuating classical background gas for several different force laws. We begin with the calculation of this effect for the Newton potential. To our knowledge, this calculation has not been done before. We then solve the same problem in the case of a Yukawa interaction, which interpolates between our long-range force result and the well-studied formula for collisional decoherence from a contact interaction. Unlike the contact interaction case, where the decoherence rate becomes independent of distance for large quantum particle separations, we observe that a long-range interaction leads to quadratic scaling of the decoherence rate with distance even at large separations. This work is relevant to the generation of massive superposition in optomechanical and atom beam experiments, and to conclude we comment on the use of this decoherence signal for gravitational detection of dark matter.

On the Principles of Differentiable Quantum Programming Languages - Shaopeng Zhu; Shih-Han Hung; Shouvanik Chakrabarti; Xiaodi Wu (2020)
Variational Quantum Circuits (VQCs), or the so-called quantum neural-networks, are predicted to be one of the most important near-term quantum applications, not only because of their similar promises as classical neural-networks, but also because of their feasibility on near-term noisy intermediate-size quantum (NISQ) machines. The need for gradient information in the training procedure of VQC applications has stimulated the development of auto-differentiation techniques for quantum circuits. We propose the first formalization of this technique, not only in the context of quantum circuits but also for imperative quantum programs (e.g., with controls), inspired by the success of differentiable programming languages in classical machine learning. In particular, we overcome a few unique difficulties caused by exotic quantum features (such as quantum no-cloning) and provide a rigorous formulation of differentiation applied to bounded-loop imperative quantum programs, its code-transformation rules, as well as a sound logic to reason about their correctness. Moreover, we have implemented our code transformation in OCaml and demonstrated the resource-efficiency of our scheme both analytically and empirically. We also conduct a case study of training a VQC instance with controls, which shows the advantage of our scheme over existing auto-differentiation for quantum circuits without controls.

Probing many-body localization on a noisy quantum computer - D. Zhu; S. Johri; N. H. Nguyen; C. Huerta Alderete; K. A. Landsman; N. M. Linke; C. Monroe; A. Y. Matsuura (2020)
A disordered system of interacting particles exhibits localized behavior when the disorder is large compared to the interaction strength. Studying this phenomenon on a quantum computer without error correction is challenging because even weak coupling to a thermal environment destroys most signatures of localization. Fortunately, spectral functions of local operators are known to contain features that can survive the presence of noise. In these spectra, discrete peaks and a soft gap at low frequencies compared to the thermal phase indicate localization. Here, we present the computation of spectral functions on a trapped-ion quantum computer for a one-dimensional Heisenberg model with disorder. Further, we design an error-mitigation technique which is effective at removing the noise from the measurement allowing clear signatures of localization to emerge as the disorder increases. Thus, we show that spectral functions can serve as a robust and scalable diagnostic of many-body localization on the current generation of quantum computers.

Probing XY phase transitions in a Josephson junction array with tunable frustration - R. Cosmic; K. Kawabata; Y. Ashida; H. Ikegami; S. Furukawa; P. Patil; J. M. Taylor; Y. Nakamura (2020)
The seminal theoretical works of Berezinskii, Kosterlitz, and Thouless presented a new paradigm for phase transitions in condensed matter that are driven by topological excitations. These transitions have been extensively studied in the context of two-dimensional XY models -- coupled compasses -- and have generated interest in the context of quantum simulation. Here, we use a circuit quantum-electrodynamics architecture to study the critical behavior of engineered XY models through their dynamical response. In particular, we examine not only the unfrustrated case but also the fully-frustrated case which leads to enhanced degeneracy associated with the spin rotational [U(1)] and discrete chiral (Z2) symmetries. The nature of the transition in the frustrated case has posed a challenge for theoretical studies while direct experimental probes remain elusive. Here we identify the transition temperatures for both the unfrustrated and fully-frustrated XY models by probing a Josephson junction array close to equilibrium using weak microwave excitations and measuring the temperature dependence of the effective damping obtained from the complex reflection coefficient. We argue that our probing technique is primarily sensitive to the dynamics of the U(1) part.

Programmable Quantum Annealers as Noisy Gibbs Samplers - Marc Vuffray; Carleton Coffrin; Yaroslav A. Kharkov; Andrey Y. Lokhov (2020)
Drawing independent samples from high-dimensional probability distributions represents the major computational bottleneck for modern algorithms, including powerful machine learning frameworks such as deep learning. The quest for discovering larger families of distributions for which sampling can be efficiently realized has inspired an exploration beyond established computing methods and turning to novel physical devices that leverage the principles of quantum computation. Quantum annealing embodies a promising computational paradigm that is intimately related to the complexity of energy landscapes in Gibbs distributions, which relate the probabilities of system states to the energies of these states. Here, we study the sampling properties of physical realizations of quantum annealers which are implemented through programmable lattices of superconducting flux qubits. Comprehensive statistical analysis of the data produced by these quantum machines shows that quantum annealers behave as samplers that generate independent configurations from low-temperature noisy Gibbs distributions. We show that the structure of the output distribution probes the intrinsic physical properties of the quantum device such as effective temperature of individual qubits and magnitude of local qubit noise, which result in a non-linear response function and spurious interactions that are absent in the hardware implementation. We anticipate that our methodology will find widespread use in characterization of future generations of quantum annealers and other emerging analog computing devices.

Quantum algorithms and lower bounds for convex optimization - Shouvanik Chakrabarti; Andrew M. Childs; Tongyang Li; Xiaodi Wu (Quantum, 2020)
While recent work suggests that quantum computers can speed up the solution of semidefinite programs, little is known about the quantum complexity of more general convex optimization. We present a quantum algorithm that can optimize a convex function over an n-dimensional convex body using O~(n) queries to oracles that evaluate the objective function and determine membership in the convex body. This represents a quadratic improvement over the best-known classical algorithm. We also study limitations on the power of quantum computers for general convex optimization, showing that it requires Ω~(n−−√) evaluation queries and Ω(n−−√) membership queries.

Quantum Algorithms for Simulating the Lattice Schwinger Model - Alexander F. Shaw; Pavel Lougovski; Jesse R. Stryker; Nathan Wiebe (Quantum, 2020)
The Schwinger model (quantum electrodynamics in 1+1 dimensions) is a testbed for the study of quantum gauge field theories. We give scalable, explicit digital quantum algorithms to simulate the lattice Schwinger model in both NISQ and fault-tolerant settings. In particular, we perform a tight analysis of low-order Trotter formula simulations of the Schwinger model, using recently derived commutator bounds, and give upper bounds on the resources needed for simulations in both scenarios. In lattice units, we find a Schwinger model on N/2 physical sites with coupling constant x−1/2 and electric field cutoff x−1/2Λ can be simulated on a quantum computer for time 2xT using a number of T-gates or CNOTs in O˜(N3/2T3/2x−−√Λ) for fixed operator error. This scaling with the truncation Λ is better than that expected from algorithms such as qubitization or QDRIFT. Furthermore, we give scalable measurement schemes and algorithms to estimate observables which we cost in both the NISQ and fault-tolerant settings by assuming a simple target observable---the mean pair density. Finally, we bound the root-mean-square error in estimating this observable via simulation as a function of the diamond distance between the ideal and actual CNOT channels. This work provides a rigorous analysis of simulating the Schwinger model, while also providing benchmarks against which subsequent simulation algorithms can be tested.

Quantum algorithms for the polynomial eigenvalue problems - Changpeng Shao; Jin-Peng Liu (2020)
Polynomial eigenvalue problems (PEPs) arise in a variety of science and engineering applications, and many breakthroughs in the development of classical algorithms to solve PEPs have been made in the past decades. Here we attempt to solve PEPs in a quantum computer. Firstly, for generalized eigenvalue problems (GEPs) $A\x = λ B\x$ with A,B symmetric, and B positive definite, we give a quantum algorithm based on block-encoding and quantum phase estimation. In a more general case when B is invertible, B−1A is diagonalizable and all the eigenvalues are real, we propose a quantum algorithm based on the Fourier spectral method to solve ordinary differential equations (ODEs). The inputs of our algorithms can be any desired states, and the outputs are superpositions of the eigenpairs. The complexities are polylog in the matrix size and linear in the precision. The dependence on precision is optimal. Secondly, we show that when B is singular, any quantum algorithm uses at least Ω(n−−√) queries to compute the eigenvalues, where n is the matrix size. Thirdly, based on the linearization method and the connection between PEPs and higher-order ODEs, we provide two quantum algorithms to solve PEPs by extending the quantum algorithm for GEPs. We also give detailed complexity analysis of the algorithm for two special types of quadratic eigenvalue problems that are important in practice. Finally, under an extra assumption, we propose a quantum algorithm to solve PEPs when the eigenvalues are complex.

On Quantum Chosen-Ciphertext Attacks and Learning with Errors - Gorjan Alagic; Stacey Jeffery; Maris Ozols; Alexander Poremba (Cryptography, 2020)
Large-scale quantum computing poses a major threat to classical public-key cryptography. Recently, strong “quantum access” security models have shown that numerous symmetric-key cryptosystems are also vulnerable. In this paper, we consider classical encryption in a model that grants the adversary quantum oracle access to encryption and decryption, but where we restrict the latter to non-adaptive (i.e., pre-challenge) queries only. We formalize this model using appropriate notions of ciphertext indistinguishability and semantic security (which are equivalent by standard arguments) and call it QCCA1 in analogy to the classical CCA1 security model. We show that the standard pseudorandom function ( PRF )-based encryption schemes are QCCA1 -secure when instantiated with quantum-secure primitives. Our security proofs use a strong bound on quantum random-access codes with shared randomness. Revisiting plain IND−CPA -secure Learning with Errors ( LWE ) encryption, we show that leaking only a single quantum decryption query (and no other leakage or queries of any kind) allows the adversary to recover the full secret key with constant success probability. Information-theoretically, full recovery of the key in the classical setting requires at least a linear number of decryption queries. Our results thus challenge the notion that LWE is unconditionally “just as secure” quantumly as it is classically. The algorithm at the core of our attack is a new variant of the well-known Bernstein–Vazirani algorithm. Finally, we emphasize that our results should not be interpreted as a weakness of these cryptosystems in their stated security setting (i.e., post-quantum chosen-plaintext secrecy). Rather, our results mean that, if these cryptosystems are exposed to chosen-ciphertext attacks (e.g., as a result of deployment in an inappropriate real-world setting) then quantum attacks are even more devastating than classical ones.

Quantum coding with low-depth random circuits - Michael Gullans; Stefan Krastanov; David A. Huse; Liang Jiang; Steven T. Flammia (2020)
Random quantum circuits have played a central role in establishing the computational advantages of near-term quantum computers over their conventional counterparts. Here, we use ensembles of low-depth random circuits with local connectivity in D≥1 spatial dimensions to generate quantum error-correcting codes. For random stabilizer codes and the erasure channel, we find strong evidence that a depth O(logN) random circuit is necessary and sufficient to converge (with high probability) to zero failure probability for any finite amount below the channel capacity for any D. Previous results on random circuits have only shown that O(N1/D) depth suffices or that O(log3N) depth suffices for all-to-all connectivity (D→∞). We then study the critical behavior of the erasure threshold in the so-called moderate deviation limit, where both the failure probability and the distance to the channel capacity converge to zero with N. We find that the requisite depth scales like O(logN) only for dimensions D≥2, and that random circuits require O(N−−√) depth for D=1. Finally, we introduce an "expurgation" algorithm that uses quantum measurements to remove logical operators that cause the code to fail by turning them into either additional stabilizers or into gauge operators in a subsystem code. With such targeted measurements, we can achieve sub-logarithmic depth in D≥2 spatial dimensions below capacity without increasing the maximum weight of the check operators. We find that for any rate beneath the capacity, high-performing codes with thousands of logical qubits are achievable with depth 4-8 expurgated random circuits in D=2 dimensions. These results indicate that finite-rate quantum codes are practically relevant for near-term devices and may significantly reduce the resource requirements to achieve fault tolerance for near-term applications.

Quantum Coupon Collector - Srinivasan Arunachalam; Aleksandrs Belovs; Andrew M. Childs; Robin Kothari; Ansis Rosmanis; Ronald de Wolf (Proceedings of the 15th Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography (TQC 2020), Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, 2020)
We study how efficiently a k-element set S⊆[n] can be learned from a uniform superposition |S⟩ of its elements. One can think of |S⟩=∑i∈S|i⟩/|S|−−−√ as the quantum version of a uniformly random sample over S, as in the classical analysis of the ``coupon collector problem.'' We show that if k is close to n, then we can learn S using asymptotically fewer quantum samples than random samples. In particular, if there are n−k=O(1) missing elements then O(k) copies of |S⟩ suffice, in contrast to the Θ(klogk) random samples needed by a classical coupon collector. On the other hand, if n−k=Ω(k), then Ω(klogk) quantum samples are~necessary. More generally, we give tight bounds on the number of quantum samples needed for every k and n, and we give efficient quantum learning algorithms. We also give tight bounds in the model where we can additionally reflect through |S⟩. Finally, we relate coupon collection to a known example separating proper and improper PAC learning that turns out to show no separation in the quantum case.

Quantum Lifshitz criticality in a frustrated two-dimensional XY model - Yaroslav A. Kharkov; Jaan Oitmaa; Oleg P. Sushkov (Phys. Rev. B, 2020)
Antiferromagnetic quantum spin systems can exhibit a transition between collinear and spiral ground states, driven by frustration. Classically this is a smooth crossover and the crossover point is termed a Lifshitz point. Quantum fluctuations change the nature of the transition. In particular, it has been argued previously that in the two-dimensional (2D) case a spin liquid (SL) state is developed in the vicinity of the Lifshitz point, termed a Lifshitz SL. In the present work, using a field theory approach, we solve the Lifshitz quantum phase transition problem for the 2D frustrated XY model. Specifically, we show that, unlike the SU (2) symmetric Lifshitz case, in the XY model, the SL exists only at the critical point. At zero temperature we calculate nonuniversal critical exponents in the Néel and in the spin spiral state and relate these to properties of the SL. We also solve the transition problem at a finite temperature and discuss the role of topological excitations.

Quantum Simulation of Hyperbolic Space with Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics: From Graphs to Geometry - Igor Boettcher; Przemyslaw Bienias; Ron Belyansky; Alicia J. Kollár; Alexey V. Gorshkov (Phys. Rev. A, 2020)
We show how quantum many-body systems on hyperbolic lattices with nearest-neighbor hopping and local interactions can be mapped onto quantum field theories in continuous negatively curved space. The underlying lattices have recently been realized experimentally with superconducting resonators and therefore allow for a table-top quantum simulation of quantum physics in curved background. Our mapping provides a computational tool to determine observables of the discrete system even for large lattices, where exact diagonalization fails. As an application and proof of principle we quantitatively reproduce the ground state energy, spectral gap, and correlation functions of the noninteracting lattice system by means of analytic formulas on the Poincaré disk, and show how conformal symmetry emerges for large lattices. This sets the stage for studying interactions and disorder on hyperbolic graphs in the future. Our analysis also reveals in which sense discrete hyperbolic lattices emulate the continuous geometry of negatively curved space and thus can be used to resolve fundamental open problems at the interface of interacting many-body systems, quantum field theory in curved space, and quantum gravity.

Quantum simulation with hybrid tensor networks - Xiao Yuan; Jinzhao Sun; Junyu Liu; Qi Zhao; You Zhou (2020)
Tensor network theory and quantum simulation are respectively the key classical and quantum methods in understanding many-body quantum physics. Here we show hybridization of these two seemingly independent methods, inheriting both their distinct advantageous features of efficient representations of many-body wave functions. We introduce the framework of hybrid tensor networks with building blocks consisting of measurable quantum states and classically contractable tensors. As an example, we demonstrate efficient quantum simulation with hybrid tree tensor networks that use quantum hardware whose size is significantly smaller than the one of the target system. We numerically test our method for finding the ground state of 1D and 2D spin systems of up to 8×8 and 4×3 qubits with operations only acting on 8+1 and 4+1 qubits, respectively. Our approach paves the way to the near-term quantum simulation of large practical problems with intermediate size quantum hardware, with potential applications in quantum chemistry, quantum many-body physics, quantum field theory, and quantum gravity thought experiments.

Quantum spectral methods for differential equations - Andrew M. Childs; Jin-Peng Liu (Commun. Math. Phys., 2020)
Recently developed quantum algorithms address computational challenges in numerical analysis by performing linear algebra in Hilbert space. Such algorithms can produce a quantum state proportional to the solution of a d-dimensional system of linear equations or linear differential equations with complexity poly(logd). While several of these algorithms approximate the solution to within ε with complexity poly(log(1/ε)), no such algorithm was previously known for differential equations with time-dependent coefficients. Here we develop a quantum algorithm for linear ordinary differential equations based on so-called spectral methods, an alternative to finite difference methods that approximates the solution globally. Using this approach, we give a quantum algorithm for time-dependent initial and boundary value problems with complexity poly(logd,log(1/ε)).

Quantum walks and Dirac cellular automata on a programmable trapped-ion quantum computer - C. Huerta Alderete; Shivani Singh; Nhung H. Nguyen; Daiwei Zhu; Radhakrishnan Balu; Christopher Monroe; C. M. Chandrashekar; Norbert M. Linke (2020)
The quantum walk formalism is a widely used and highly successful framework for modeling quantum systems, such as simulations of the Dirac equation, different dynamics in both the low and high energy regime, and for developing a wide range of quantum algorithms. Here we present the circuit-based implementation of a discrete-time quantum walk in position space on a five-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor. We encode the space of walker positions in particular multi-qubit states and program the system to operate with different quantum walk parameters, experimentally realizing a Dirac cellular automaton with tunable mass parameter. The quantum walk circuits and position state mapping scale favorably to a larger model and physical systems, allowing the implementation of any algorithm based on discrete-time quantum walks algorithm and the dynamics associated with the discretized version of the Dirac equation.

Quantum-Access-Secure Message Authentication via Blind-Unforgeability - Gorjan Alagic; Christian Majenz; Alexander Russell; Fang Song (In: Canteaut A., Ishai Y. (eds) Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Cham, 2020)
Formulating and designing authentication of classical messages in the presence of adversaries with quantum query access has been a longstanding challenge, as the familiar classical notions of unforgeability do not directly translate into meaningful notions in the quantum setting. A particular difficulty is how to fairly capture the notion of “predicting an unqueried value” when the adversary can query in quantum superposition. We propose a natural definition of unforgeability against quantum adversaries called blind unforgeability. This notion defines a function to be predictable if there exists an adversary who can use “partially blinded” oracle access to predict values in the blinded region. We support the proposal with a number of technical results. We begin by establishing that the notion coincides with EUF-CMA in the classical setting and go on to demonstrate that the notion is satisfied by a number of simple guiding examples, such as random functions and quantum-query-secure pseudorandom functions. We then show the suitability of blind unforgeability for supporting canonical constructions and reductions. We prove that the “hash-and-MAC” paradigm and the Lamport one-time digital signature scheme are indeed unforgeable according to the definition. To support our analysis, we additionally define and study a new variety of quantum-secure hash functions called Bernoulli-preserving. Finally, we demonstrate that blind unforgeability is strictly stronger than a previous definition of Boneh and Zhandry [EUROCRYPT ’13, CRYPTO ’13] and resolve an open problem concerning this previous definition by constructing an explicit function family which is forgeable yet satisfies the definition.

Quasi-polynomial Time Approximation of Output Probabilities of Constant-depth, Geometrically-local Quantum Circuits - Nolan J. Coble; Matthew Coudron (Accepted to QIP 2021, 2020)
We present a classical algorithm that, for any 3D geometrically-local, constant-depth quantum circuit C, and any bit string x∈{0,1}n, can compute the quantity |<x|C|0⊗n>|2 to within any inverse-polynomial additive error in quasi-polynomial time. It is known that it is #P-hard to compute this same quantity to within 2−n2 additive error [Mov20]. The previous best known algorithm for this problem used O(2n1/3poly(1/ε)) time to compute probabilities to within additive error ε [BGM20]. Notably, the [BGM20] paper included an elegant polynomial time algorithm for the same estimation task with 2D circuits, which makes a novel use of 1D Matrix Product States carefully tailored to the 2D geometry of the circuit in question. Surprisingly, it is not clear that it is possible to extend this use of MPS to address the case of 3D circuits in polynomial time. This raises a natural question as to whether the computational complexity of the 3D problem might be drastically higher than that of the 2D problem. In this work we address this question by exhibiting a quasi-polynomial time algorithm for the 3D case. In order to surpass the technical barriers encountered by previously known techniques we are forced to pursue a novel approach: Our algorithm has a Divide-and-Conquer structure, constructing a recursive sub-division of the given 3D circuit using carefully designed block-encodings, each creating a 3D-local circuit on at most half the number of qubits as the original. This division step is then applied recursively, expressing the original quantity as a weighted sum of smaller and smaller 3D-local quantum circuits. A central technical challenge is to control correlations arising from the entanglement that may exist between the different circuit "pieces" produced this way.

Quasi-polynomial time approximation of output probabilities of geometrically-local, shallow quantum circuits - Nolan J. Coble; Matthew Coudron (2020)
We present a classical algorithm that, for any 3D geometrically-local, polylogarithmic-depth quantum circuit C acting on n qubits, and any bit string x∈{0,1}n, can compute the quantity |<x|C|0⊗n>|2 to within any inverse-polynomial additive error in quasi-polynomial time. It is known that it is #P-hard to compute this same quantity to within 2−n2 additive error [Mov20, KMM21]. The previous best known algorithm for this problem used O(2n1/3poly(1/ϵ)) time to compute probabilities to within additive error ϵ [BGM20]. Notably, the [BGM20] paper included an elegant polynomial time algorithm for this estimation task restricted to 2D circuits, which makes a novel use of 1D Matrix Product States (MPS) carefully tailored to the 2D geometry of the circuit in question. Surprisingly, it is not clear that it is possible to extend this use of MPS to address the case of 3D circuits in polynomial time. This raises a natural question as to whether the computational complexity of the 3D problem might be drastically higher than that of the 2D problem. In this work we address this question by exhibiting a quasi-polynomial time algorithm for the 3D case. In order to surpass the technical barriers encountered by previously known techniques we are forced to pursue a novel approach. Our algorithm has a Divide-and-Conquer structure, demonstrating how to approximate the desired quantity via several instantiations of the same problem type, each involving 3D-local circuits on about half the number of qubits as the original. This division step is then applied recursively, expressing the original quantity as a weighted combination of smaller and smaller 3D-local quantum circuits. A central technical challenge is to control correlations arising from entanglement that may exist between the different circuit ``pieces" produced this way.

Random Quantum Batteries - Francesco Caravelli; Ghislaine Coulter-De Wit; Luis Pedro García-Pintos; Alioscia Hamma (Phys. Rev. Research, 2020)
Quantum nano-devices are fundamental systems in quantum thermodynamics that have been the subject of profound interest in recent years. Among these, quantum batteries play a very important role. In this paper we lay down a theory of random quantum batteries and provide a systematic way of computing the average work and work fluctuations in such devices by investigating their typical behavior. We show that the performance of random quantum batteries exhibits typicality and depends only on the spectral properties of the time evolving operator, the initial state and the measuring Hamiltonian. At given revival times a random quantum battery features a quantum advantage over classical random batteries. Our method is particularly apt to be used both for exactly solvable models like the Jaynes-Cummings model or in perturbation theory, e.g., systems subject to harmonic perturbations. We also study the setting of quantum adiabatic random batteries.

Raw Image Deblurring - Chih-Hung Liang; Yu-An Chen; Yueh-Cheng Liu; Winston H. Hsu (2020)
Deep learning-based blind image deblurring plays an essential role in solving image blur since all existing kernels are limited in modeling the real world blur. Thus far, researchers focus on powerful models to handle the deblurring problem and achieve decent results. For this work, in a new aspect, we discover the great opportunity for image enhancement (e.g., deblurring) directly from RAW images and investigate novel neural network structures benefiting RAW-based learning. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no available RAW image deblurring dataset. Therefore, we built a new dataset containing both RAW images and processed sRGB images and design a new model to utilize the unique characteristics of RAW images. The proposed deblurring model, trained solely from RAW images, achieves the state-of-art performance and outweighs those trained on processed sRGB images. Furthermore, with fine-tuning, the proposed model, trained on our new dataset, can generalize to other sensors. Additionally, by a series of experiments, we demonstrate that existing deblurring models can also be improved by training on the RAW images in our new dataset. Ultimately, we show a new venue for further opportunities based on the devised novel raw-based deblurring method and the brand-new Deblur-RAW dataset.

Ray-based classification framework for high-dimensional data - Justyna P. Zwolak; Sandesh S. Kalantre; Thomas McJunkin; Brian J. Weber; J. M. Taylor (Proceedings of the Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences Workshop at NeurIPS 2020, Vancouver, Canada, 2020)
While classification of arbitrary structures in high dimensions may require complete quantitative information, for simple geometrical structures, low-dimensional qualitative information about the boundaries defining the structures can suffice. Rather than using dense, multi-dimensional data, we propose a deep neural network (DNN) classification framework that utilizes a minimal collection of one-dimensional representations, called rays, to construct the "fingerprint" of the structure(s) based on substantially reduced information. We empirically study this framework using a synthetic dataset of double and triple quantum dot devices and apply it to the classification problem of identifying the device state. We show that the performance of the ray-based classifier is already on par with traditional 2D images for low dimensional systems, while significantly cutting down the data acquisition cost.

Realizing and Probing Baryonic Excitations in Rydberg Atom Arrays - Fangli Liu; Seth Whitsitt; Przemyslaw Bienias; Rex Lundgren; Alexey V. Gorshkov (2020)
We propose a realization of mesonic and baryonic quasiparticle excitations in Rydberg atom arrays with programmable interactions. Recent experiments have shown that such systems possess a Z3-ordered crystalline phase whose low-energy quasiparticles are defects in the crystalline order. By engineering a Z3-translational-symmetry breaking field on top of the Rydberg-blockaded Hamiltonian, we show that different types of defects experience confinement, and as a consequence form mesonic or baryonic quasiparticle excitations. We illustrate the formation of these quasiparticles by studying a quantum chiral clock model related to the Rydberg Hamiltonian. We then propose an experimental protocol involving out-of-equilibrium dynamics to directly probe the spectrum of the confined excitations. We show that the confined quasiparticle spectrum can limit quantum information spreading in this system. This proposal is readily applicable to current Rydberg experiments, and the method can be easily generalized to more complex confined excitations (e.g. `tetraquarks', `pentaquarks') in phases with Zq order for q>3.

Resonant enhancement of three-body loss between strongly interacting photons - Marcin Kalinowski; Yidan Wang; Przemyslaw Bienias; Michael Gullans; Dalia P. Ornelas-Huerta; Alexander N. Craddock; Steven L. Rolston; J. V. Porto; Hans Peter Büchler; Alexey V. Gorshkov (2020)
Rydberg polaritons provide an example of a rare type of system where three-body interactions can be as strong or even stronger than two-body interactions. The three-body interactions can be either dispersive or dissipative, with both types possibly giving rise to exotic, strongly-interacting, and topological phases of matter. Despite past theoretical and experimental studies of the regime with dispersive interaction, the dissipative regime is still mostly unexplored. Using a renormalization group technique to solve the three-body Schrödinger equation, we show how the shape and strength of dissipative three-body forces can be universally enhanced for Rydberg polaritons. We demonstrate how these interactions relate to the transmission through a single-mode cavity, which can be used as a probe of the three-body physics in current experiment

Robust Encoding of a Qubit in a Molecule - Victor V. Albert; Jacob P. Covey; John Preskill (Phys. Rev. X, 2020)
We construct quantum error-correcting codes that embed a finite-dimensional code space in the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space of rotational states of a rigid body. These codes, which protect against both drift in the body’s orientation and small changes in its angular momentum, may be well suited for robust storage and coherent processing of quantum information using rotational states of a polyatomic molecule. Extensions of such codes to rigid bodies with a symmetry axis are compatible with rotational states of diatomic molecules as well as nuclear states of molecules and atoms. We also describe codes associated with general non-Abelian groups and develop orthogonality relations for coset spaces, laying the groundwork for quantum information processing with exotic configuration spaces.

Sampling-based sublinear low-rank matrix arithmetic framework for dequantizing quantum machine learning - Nai-Hui Chia; Andras Gilyen; Tongyang Li; Han-Hsuan Lin; Ewin Tang; Chunhao Wang (to appear in Proceedings of STOC 2020, 2020)
We present an algorithmic framework for quantum-inspired classical algorithms on close-to-low-rank matrices, generalizing the series of results started by Tang's breakthrough quantum-inspired algorithm for recommendation systems [STOC'19]. Motivated by quantum linear algebra algorithms and the quantum singular value transformation (SVT) framework of Gilyén et al. [STOC'19], we develop classical algorithms for SVT that run in time independent of input dimension, under suitable quantum-inspired sampling assumptions. Our results give compelling evidence that in the corresponding QRAM data structure input model, quantum SVT does not yield exponential quantum speedups. Since the quantum SVT framework generalizes essentially all known techniques for quantum linear algebra, our results, combined with sampling lemmas from previous work, suffice to generalize all recent results about dequantizing quantum machine learning algorithms. In particular, our classical SVT framework recovers and often improves the dequantization results on recommendation systems, principal component analysis, supervised clustering, support vector machines, low-rank regression, and semidefinite program solving. We also give additional dequantization results on low-rank Hamiltonian simulation and discriminant analysis. Our improvements come from identifying the key feature of the quantum-inspired input model that is at the core of all prior quantum-inspired results: ℓ2-norm sampling can approximate matrix products in time independent of their dimension. We reduce all our main results to this fact, making our exposition concise, self-contained, and intuitive.

Search for composite dark matter with optically levitated sensors - Fernando Monteiro; Gadi Afek; Daniel Carney; Gordan Krnjaic; Jiaxiang Wang; David C. Moore (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2020)
Results are reported from a search for a class of composite dark matter models with feeble, long-range interactions with normal matter. We search for impulses arising from passing dark matter particles by monitoring the mechanical motion of an optically levitated nanogram mass over the course of several days. Assuming such particles constitute the dominant component of dark matter, this search places upper limits on their interaction with neutrons of αn≤1.2×10−7 at 95% confidence for dark matter masses between 1--10 TeV and mediator masses mφ≤0.1 eV. Due to the large enhancement of the cross-section for dark matter to coherently scatter from a nanogram mass (∼1029 times that for a single neutron) and the ability to detect momentum transfers as small as ∼200 MeV/c, these results provide sensitivity to certain classes of composite dark matter models that substantially exceeds existing searches, including those employing kg-scale or ton-scale targets. Extensions of these techniques can enable directionally-sensitive searches for a broad class of previously inaccessible heavy dark matter candidates.

Secure Quantum Two-Party Computation: Impossibility and Constructions - Michele Ciamp; Alexandru Cojocaru; Elham Kashefi; Atul Mantri (2020)
Secure two-party computation considers the problem of two parties computing a joint function of their private inputs without revealing anything beyond the output of the computation. In this work, we take the first steps towards understanding the setting in which the two parties want to evaluate a joint quantum functionality while using only a classical channel between them. Our first result indicates that it is in general impossible to realize a two-party quantum functionality against malicious adversaries with black-box simulation, relying only on classical channels. The negative result stems from reducing the existence of a black-box simulator to an extractor for classical proof of quantum knowledge, which in turn leads to violation of the quantum no-cloning. Next, we introduce the notion of oblivious quantum function evaluation (OQFE). An OQFE is a two-party quantum cryptographic primitive with one fully classical party (Alice) whose input is (a classical description of a) quantum unitary, U, and a quantum party (Bob) whose input is a quantum state, ψ. In particular, Alice receives a classical output corresponding to the measurement of U(ψ) while Bob receives no output. In OQFE, Bob remains oblivious to Alice's input, while Alice learns nothing about ψ more than what can be learned from the output. We present two constructions, one secure against semi-honest parties and the other against malicious parties. Due to the no-go result mentioned above, we consider what is arguably the best possible notion obtainable in our model concerning malicious adversaries: one-sided simulation security. Our protocol relies on the assumption of injective homomorphic trapdoor OWFs, which in turn rely on the LWE problem. As a result, we put forward a first, simple and modular, construction of one-sided quantum two-party computation and quantum oblivious transfer over classical networks.

Security Limitations of Classical-Client Delegated Quantum Computing - Christian Badertscher; Alexandru Cojocaru; Léo Colisson; Elham Kashefi; Dominik Leichtle; Atul Mantri; Petros Wallden (2020)
Secure delegated quantum computing allows a computationally weak client to outsource an arbitrary quantum computation to an untrusted quantum server in a privacy-preserving manner. One of the promising candidates to achieve classical delegation of quantum computation is classical-client remote state preparation (RSPCC), where a client remotely prepares a quantum state using a classical channel. However, the privacy loss incurred by employing RSPCC as a sub-module is unclear. In this work, we investigate this question using the Constructive Cryptography framework by Maurer and Renner (ICS'11). We first identify the goal of RSPCC as the construction of ideal RSP resources from classical channels and then reveal the security limitations of using RSPCC. First, we uncover a fundamental relationship between constructing ideal RSP resources (from classical channels) and the task of cloning quantum states. Any classically constructed ideal RSP resource must leak to the server the full classical description (possibly in an encoded form) of the generated quantum state, even if we target computational security only. As a consequence, we find that the realization of common RSP resources, without weakening their guarantees drastically, is impossible due to the no-cloning theorem. Second, the above result does not rule out that a specific RSPCC protocol can replace the quantum channel at least in some contexts, such as the Universal Blind Quantum Computing (UBQC) protocol of Broadbent et al. (FOCS '09). However, we show that the resulting UBQC protocol cannot maintain its proven composable security as soon as RSPCC is used as a subroutine. Third, we show that replacing the quantum channel of the above UBQC protocol by the RSPCC protocol QFactory of Cojocaru et al. (Asiacrypt '19), preserves the weaker, game-based, security of UBQC.

Signaling and Scrambling with Strongly Long-Range Interactions - Andrew Y. Guo; Minh C. Tran; Andrew M. Childs; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Zhe-Xuan Gong (Physical Review A, 2020)
Strongly long-range interacting quantum systems---those with interactions decaying as a power-law 1/rα in the distance r on a D-dimensional lattice for α≤D---have received significant interest in recent years. They are present in leading experimental platforms for quantum computation and simulation, as well as in theoretical models of quantum information scrambling and fast entanglement creation. Since no notion of locality is expected in such systems, a general understanding of their dynamics is lacking. As a first step towards rectifying this problem, we prove two new Lieb-Robinson-type bounds that constrain the time for signaling and scrambling in strongly long-range interacting systems, for which no tight bounds were previously known. Our first bound applies to systems mappable to free-particle Hamiltonians with long-range hopping, and is saturable for α≤D/2. Our second bound pertains to generic long-range interacting spin Hamiltonians, and leads to a tight lower bound for the signaling time to extensive subsets of the system for all α<D. This result also lower-bounds the scrambling time, and suggests a path towards achieving a tight scrambling bound that can prove the long-standing fast scrambling conjecture.

Simulating Hamiltonian Dynamics with an Off-diagonal Series Expansion - Amir Kalev; Itay Hen (2020)
We propose an efficient quantum algorithm for simulating the dynamics of general Hamiltonian systems. Our technique is based on a power series expansion of the time-evolution operator in its off-diagonal terms. The expansion decouples the dynamics due to the diagonal component of the Hamiltonian from the dynamics generated by its off-diagonal part, which we encode using the linear combination of unitaries technique. Our method has an optimal dependence on the desired precision and, as we illustrate, generally requires considerably fewer resources than the current state-of-the-art. We provide an analysis of resource costs for several sample models.

Simulating large quantum circuits on a small quantum computer - Tianyi Peng; Aram Harrow; Maris Ozols; Xiaodi Wu (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2020)
Limited quantum memory is one of the most important constraints for near-term quantum devices. Understanding whether a small quantum computer can simulate a larger quantum system, or execute an algorithm requiring more qubits than available, is both of theoretical and practical importance. In this Letter, we introduce cluster parameters K and d of a quantum circuit. The tensor network of such a circuit can be decomposed into clusters of size at most d with at most K qubits of inter-cluster quantum communication. Our main result is a simulation scheme of any (K,d)-clustered quantum circuit on a d-qubit machine in time roughly 2O(K). An important application of our result is the simulation of clustered quantum systems---such as large molecules---that can be partitioned into multiple significantly smaller clusters with weak interactions among them. Another potential application is quantum optimization: we demonstrate numerically that variational quantum eigensolvers can still perform well when restricted to clustered circuits, thus making it feasible to study large quantum systems on small quantum devices.

A Sparse Model of Quantum Holography - Shenglong Xu; Leonard Susskind; Yuan Su; Brian Swingle (2020)
We study a sparse version of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model defined on random hypergraphs constructed either by a random pruning procedure or by randomly sampling regular hypergraphs. The resulting model has a new parameter, k, defined as the ratio of the number of terms in the Hamiltonian to the number of degrees of freedom, with the sparse limit corresponding to the thermodynamic limit at fixed k. We argue that this sparse SYK model recovers the interesting global physics of ordinary SYK even when k is of order unity. In particular, at low temperature the model exhibits a gravitational sector which is maximally chaotic. Our argument proceeds by constructing a path integral for the sparse model which reproduces the conventional SYK path integral plus gapped fluctuations. The sparsity of the model permits larger scale numerical calculations than previously possible, the results of which are consistent with the path integral analysis. Additionally, we show that the sparsity of the model considerably reduces the cost of quantum simulation algorithms. This makes the sparse SYK model the most efficient currently known route to simulate a holographic model of quantum gravity. We also define and study a sparse supersymmetric SYK model, with similar conclusions to the non-supersymmetric case. Looking forward, we argue that the class of models considered here constitute an interesting and relatively unexplored sparse frontier in quantum many-body physics.

Spin-Mediated Mott Excitons - T. -S. Huang; Christopher L. Baldwin; M. Hafezi; V. Galitski (2020)
Motivated by recent experiments on Mott insulators, in both iridates and ultracold atoms, we theoretically study the effects of magnetic order on the Mott-Hubbard excitons. In particular, we focus on spin-mediated doublon-holon pairing in Hubbard materials. We use several complementary theoretical techniques: mean-field theory to describe the spin degrees of freedom, the self-consistent Born approximation to characterize individual charge excitations across the Hubbard gap, and the Bethe-Salpeter equation to identify bound states of doublons and holons. The binding energy of the Hubbard exciton is found to increase with increasing the Néel order parameter, while the exciton mass decreases. We observe that these trends rely significantly on the retardation of the effective interaction, and require consideration of multiple effects from changing the magnetic order. Our results are consistent with the key qualitative trends observed in recent experiments on iridates. Moreover, the findings could have direct implications on ultracold atom Mott insulators, where the Hubbard model is the exact description of the system and the microscopic degrees of freedom can be directly accessed.

Status Report on the Second Round of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process - Gorjan Alagic; Jacob Alperin-Sheriff; Daniel Apon; David Cooper; Quynh Dang; John Kelsey; Yi-Kai Liu; Carl Miller; Dustin Moody; Rene Peralta; Ray Perlner; Angela Robinson; et al. (NISTIR 8309, 2020)
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is in the process of selecting one or more public-key cryptographic algorithms through a public, competition-like process. The new public-key cryptography standards will specify one or more additional digital signatures, public-key encryption, and key-establishment algorithms to augment Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 186-4, Digital Signature Standard (DSS), as well as NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-56A Revision 3, Recommendation for Pair-Wise Key-Establishment Schemes Using Discrete Logarithm Cryptography, and SP 800-56B Revision 2, Recommendation for Pair-Wise Key Establishment Using Integer Factorization Cryptography. It is intended that these algorithms will be capable of protecting sensitive information well into the foreseeable future, including after the advent of quantum computers. The NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process began in 2017 with 69 candidate algorithms that met both the minimum acceptance criteria and submission requirements. The first round lasted until January 2019, during which candidate algorithms were evaluated based on their security, performance, and other characteristics. NIST selected 26 algorithms to advance to the second round for more analysis. This report describes the evaluation and selection process, based on public feedback and internal review, of the second-round candidates. The report summarizes the 26 second-round candidate algorithms and identifies those selected to move forward to the third round of the competition. The third-round finalist public-key encryption and key-establishment algorithms are Classic McEliece, CRYSTALS-KYBER, NTRU, and SABER. The third-round finalists for digital signatures are CRYSTALS-DILITHIUM, FALCON, and Rainbow. These finalists will be considered for standardization at the end of the third round. In addition, eight alternate candidate algorithms will also advance to the third round: BIKE, FrodoKEM, HQC, NTRU Prime, SIKE, GeMSS, Picnic, and SPHINCS+. These additional candidates are still being considered for standardization, although this is unlikely to occur at the end of the third round. NIST hopes that the announcement of these finalists and additional candidates will serve to focus the cryptographic community’s attention during the next round.

Studying viral populations with tools from quantum spin chains - Saumya Shivam; Christopher L. Baldwin; John Barton; Mehran Kardar; S. L. Sondhi (2020)
We study Eigen's model of quasi-species, characterized by sequences that replicate with a specified fitness and mutate independently at single sites. The evolution of the population vector in time is then closely related to that of quantum spins in imaginary time. We employ multiple perspectives and tools from interacting quantum systems to examine growth and collapse of realistic viral populations, specifically certain HIV proteins. All approaches used, including the simplest perturbation theory, give consistent results.

Sublinear classical and quantum algorithms for general matrix games - Tongyang Li; Chunhao Wang; Shouvanik Chakrabarti; Xiaodi Wu (To appear in the Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2021), 2020)
We investigate sublinear classical and quantum algorithms for matrix games, a fundamental problem in optimization and machine learning, with provable guarantees. Given a matrix A∈Rn×d, sublinear algorithms for the matrix game minx∈Xmaxy∈Yy⊤Ax were previously known only for two special cases: (1) Y being the ℓ1-norm unit ball, and (2) X being either the ℓ1- or the ℓ2-norm unit ball. We give a sublinear classical algorithm that can interpolate smoothly between these two cases: for any fixed q∈(1,2], we solve the matrix game where X is a ℓq-norm unit ball within additive error ε in time O~((n+d)/ε2). We also provide a corresponding sublinear quantum algorithm that solves the same task in time O~((n−−√+d−−√)poly(1/ε)) with a quadratic improvement in both n and d. Both our classical and quantum algorithms are optimal in the dimension parameters n and d up to poly-logarithmic factors. Finally, we propose sublinear classical and quantum algorithms for the approximate Carathéodory problem and the ℓq-margin support vector machines as applications.

Symmetries, graph properties, and quantum speedups - Shalev Ben-David; Andrew M. Childs; Andras Gilyen; William Kretschmer; Supartha Podder; Daochen Wang (Proceedings of the 61st IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2020), pp. 649–660 (2020), 2020)
Aaronson and Ambainis (2009) and Chailloux (2018) showed that fully symmetric (partial) functions do not admit exponential quantum query speedups. This raises a natural question: how symmetric must a function be before it cannot exhibit a large quantum speedup? In this work, we prove that hypergraph symmetries in the adjacency matrix model allow at most a polynomial separation between randomized and quantum query complexities. We also show that, remarkably, permutation groups constructed out of these symmetries are essentially the only permutation groups that prevent super-polynomial quantum speedups. We prove this by fully characterizing the primitive permutation groups that allow super-polynomial quantum speedups. In contrast, in the adjacency list model for bounded-degree graphs (where graph symmetry is manifested differently), we exhibit a property testing problem that shows an exponential quantum speedup. These results resolve open questions posed by Ambainis, Childs, and Liu (2010) and Montanaro and de Wolf (2013).

Symmetry breaking and error correction in open quantum systems - Simon Lieu; Ron Belyansky; Jeremy T. Young; Rex Lundgren; Victor V. Albert; Alexey V. Gorshkov (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2020)
Symmetry-breaking transitions are a well-understood phenomenon of closed quantum systems in quantum optics, condensed matter, and high energy physics. However, symmetry breaking in open systems is less thoroughly understood, in part due to the richer steady-state and symmetry structure that such systems possess. For the prototypical open system---a Lindbladian---a unitary symmetry can be imposed in a "weak" or a "strong" way. We characterize the possible Zn symmetry breaking transitions for both cases. In the case of Z2, a weak-symmetry-broken phase guarantees at most a classical bit steady-state structure, while a strong-symmetry-broken phase admits a partially-protected steady-state qubit. Viewing photonic cat qubits through the lens of strong-symmetry breaking, we show how to dynamically recover the logical information after any gap-preserving strong-symmetric error; such recovery becomes perfect exponentially quickly in the number of photons. Our study forges a connection between driven-dissipative phase transitions and error correctio

Time evolution of correlation functions in quantum many-body systems - Álvaro M. Alhambra; Jonathon Riddell; Luis Pedro García-Pintos (Phys. Rev. Lett, 2020)
We give rigorous analytical results on the temporal behavior of two-point correlation functions --also known as dynamical response functions or Green's functions-- in closed many-body quantum systems. We show that in a large class of translation-invariant models the correlation functions factorize at late times ⟨A(t)B⟩β→⟨A⟩β⟨B⟩β, thus proving that dissipation emerges out of the unitary dynamics of the system. We also show that for systems with a generic spectrum the fluctuations around this late-time value are bounded by the purity of the thermal ensemble, which generally decays exponentially with system size. For auto-correlation functions we provide an upper bound on the timescale at which they reach the factorized late time value. Remarkably, this bound is only a function of local expectation values, and does not increase with system size. We give numerical examples that show that this bound is a good estimate in non-integrable models, and argue that the timescale that appears can be understood in terms of an emergent fluctuation-dissipation theorem. Our study extends to further classes of two point functions such as the symmetrized ones and the Kubo function that appears in linear response theory, for which we give analogous results.

Time-dependent Hamiltonian simulation with L1-norm scaling - Dominic W. Berry; Andrew M. Childs; Yuan Su; Xin Wang; Nathan Wiebe (Quantum, 2020)
The difficulty of simulating quantum dynamics depends on the norm of the Hamiltonian. When the Hamiltonian varies with time, the simulation complexity should only depend on this quantity instantaneously. We develop quantum simulation algorithms that exploit this intuition. For the case of sparse Hamiltonian simulation, the gate complexity scales with the L1 norm ∫t0dτ∥H(τ)∥max, whereas the best previous results scale with tmaxτ∈[0,t]∥H(τ)∥max. We also show analogous results for Hamiltonians that are linear combinations of unitaries. Our approaches thus provide an improvement over previous simulation algorithms that can be substantial when the Hamiltonian varies significantly. We introduce two new techniques: a classical sampler of time-dependent Hamiltonians and a rescaling principle for the Schrödinger equation. The rescaled Dyson-series algorithm is nearly optimal with respect to all parameters of interest, whereas the sampling-based approach is easier to realize for near-term simulation. By leveraging the L1-norm information, we obtain polynomial speedups for semi-classical simulations of scattering processes in quantum chemistry.

Time-information uncertainty relations in thermodynamics - Schuyler B. Nicholson; Luis Pedro García-Pintos; Adolfo del Campo; Jason R. Green (Nat. Phys., 2020)
Physical systems that power motion and create structure in a fixed amount of time dissipate energy and produce entropy. Whether living or synthetic, systems performing these dynamic functions must balance dissipation and speed. Here, we show that rates of energy and entropy exchange are subject to a speed limit -- a time-information uncertainty relation -- imposed by the rates of change in the information content of the system. This uncertainty relation bounds the time that elapses before the change in a thermodynamic quantity has the same magnitude as its initial standard deviation. From this general bound, we establish a family of speed limits for heat, work, entropy production, and entropy flow depending on the experimental constraints on the system. In all of these inequalities, the time scale of transient dynamical fluctuations is universally bounded by the Fisher information. Moreover, they all have a mathematical form that mirrors the Mandelstam-Tamm version of the time-energy uncertainty relation in quantum mechanics. These bounds on the speed of arbitrary observables apply to transient systems away from thermodynamic equilibrium, independent of the physical assumptions about the stochastic dynamics or their function.

Towards analog quantum simulations of lattice gauge theories with trapped ions - Zohreh Davoudi; Mohammad Hafezi; Christopher Monroe; Guido Pagano; Alireza Seif; Andrew Shaw (Physical Review Research, 2020)
Gauge field theories play a central role in modern physics and are at the heart of the Standard Model of elementary particles and interactions. Despite significant progress in applying classical computational techniques to simulate gauge theories, it has remained a challenging task to compute the real-time dynamics of systems described by gauge theories. An exciting possibility that has been explored in recent years is the use of highly-controlled quantum systems to simulate, in an analog fashion, properties of a target system whose dynamics are difficult to compute. Engineered atom-laser interactions in a linear crystal of trapped ions offer a wide range of possibilities for quantum simulations of complex physical systems. Here, we devise practical proposals for analog simulation of simple lattice gauge theories whose dynamics can be mapped onto spin-spin interactions in any dimension. These include 1+1D quantum electrodynamics, 2+1D Abelian Chern-Simons theory coupled to fermions, and 2+1D pure Z2 gauge theory. The scheme proposed, along with the optimization protocol applied, will have applications beyond the examples presented in this work, and will enable scalable analog quantum simulation of Heisenberg spin models in any number of dimensions and with arbitrary interaction strengths.

Transport and dynamics in the frustrated two-bath spin-boson model - Ron Belyansky; Seth Whitsitt; Rex Lundgren; Yidan Wang; Andrei Vrajitoarea; Andrew A. Houck; Alexey V. Gorshkov (2020)
We study the strong coupling dynamics as well as transport properties of photons in the two-bath spin-boson model, in which a spin-1/2 particle is frustratingly coupled to two independent Ohmic bosonic baths. Using a combination of numerical and analytical methods, we show that the frustration in this model gives rise to rich physics in a very wide range of energies. This is in contrast to the one-bath spin-boson model, where the non-trivial physics occurs at an energy scale close to the renormalized spin frequency. The renormalized spin frequency in the two-bath spin-boson model is still important, featuring in different observables, including the non-equiblirum dynamics of both the spin and the baths along with the elastic transport properties of a photon. The latter however reveals a much more complex structure. The elastic scattering displays non-monotonic behavior at high frequencies, and is very different in the two channels: intra- and inter-bath scattering. The photon can also be inelastically scattered, a process in which it is split into several photons of smaller energies. We show that such inelastic processes are highly anisotropic, with the outgoing particles being preferentially emitted into only one of the baths. Moreover, the inelastic scattering rate is parameterically larger than in the one-bath case, and can even exceed the total elastic rate. Our results can be verified with state-of-the-art circuit and cavity quantum electrodynamics experiments.

Understanding the Frauchiger-Renner Argument - Jeffrey Bub (2020)
In 2018, Daniela Frauchiger and Renato Renner published an article in Nature Communications entitled `Quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself.' I clarify the significance of the result and point out a common and persistent misunderstanding of the argument, which has been attacked as flawed from a variety of interpretational perspectives.

Unitary Subharmonic Response and Floquet Majorana Modes - Oles Shtanko; Ramis Movassagh (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2020)
Detection and manipulation of excitations with non-Abelian statistics, such as Majorana fermions, are essential for creating topological quantum computers. To this end, we show the connection between the existence of such localized particles and the phenomenon of unitary subharmonic response (SR) in periodically driven systems. In particular, starting from highly non-equilibrium initial states, the unpaired Majorana modes exhibit spin oscillations with twice the driving period, are localized, and can have exponentially long lifetimes in clean systems. While the lifetime of SR is limited in translationally invariant systems, we show that disorder can be engineered to stabilize the subharmonic response of Majorana modes. A viable observation of this phenomenon can be achieved using modern multi-qubit hardware, such as superconducting circuits and cold atomic systems

Universal one-dimensional discrete-time quantum walks and their implementation on near term quantum hardware - Shivani Singh; Cinthia H. Alderete; Radhakrishnan Balu; Christopher Monroe; Norbert M. Linke; C. M. Chandrashekar (2020)
Quantum walks are a promising framework for developing quantum algorithms and quantum simulations. Quantum walks represent an important test case for the application of quantum computers. Here we present different forms of discrete-time quantum walks and show their equivalence for physical realizations. Using an appropriate digital mapping of the position space on which a walker evolves onto the multi-qubit states in a quantum processor, we present different configurations of quantum circuits for the implementation of discrete-time quantum walks in one-dimensional position space. With example circuits for a five qubit machine we address scalability to higher dimensions and larger quantum processors.

Accelerated Variational Quantum Eigensolver - Daochen Wang; Oscar Higgott; Stephen Brierley (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019)
The problem of finding the ground state energy of a Hamiltonian using a quantum computer is currently solved using either the quantum phase estimation (QPE) or variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithms. For precision ε, QPE requires O(1) repetitions of circuits with depth O(1/ε), whereas each expectation estimation subroutine within VQE requires O(1/ε2) samples from circuits with depth O(1). We propose a generalised VQE algorithm that interpolates between these two regimes via a free parameter α∈[0,1] which can exploit quantum coherence over a circuit depth of O(1/εα) to reduce the number of samples to O(1/ε2(1−α)). Along the way, we give a new routine for expectation estimation under limited quantum resources that is of independent interest.

An approximate description of quantum states - Marco Paini; Amir Kalev (2019)
We introduce an approximate description of an N-qubit state, which contains sufficient information to estimate the expectation value of any observable with precision independent of N. We show, in fact, that the error in the estimation of the observables' expectation values decreases as the inverse of the square root of the number of the system's identical preparations and increases, at most, linearly in a suitably defined, N-independent, seminorm of the observables. Building the approximate description of the N-qubit state only requires repetitions of single-qubit rotations followed by single-qubit measurements and can be considered for implementation on today's Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers. The access to the expectation values of all observables for a given state leads to an efficient variational method for the determination of the minimum eigenvalue of an observable. The method represents one example of the practical significance of the approximate description of the N-qubit state. We conclude by briefly discussing extensions to generative modelling and with fermionic operators

Bang-bang control as a design principle for classical and quantum optimization algorithms - Aniruddha Bapat; Stephen Jordan (Quantum Information & Computation, 2019)
Physically motivated classical heuristic optimization algorithms such as simulated annealing (SA) treat the objective function as an energy landscape, and allow walkers to escape local minima. It has been argued that quantum properties such as tunneling may give quantum algorithms advantage in finding ground states of vast, rugged cost landscapes. Indeed, the Quantum Adiabatic Algorithm (QAO) and the recent Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) have shown promising results on various problem instances that are considered classically hard. Here, we argue that the type of control strategy used by the optimization algorithm may be crucial to its success. Along with SA, QAO and QAOA, we define a new, bang-bang version of simulated annealing, BBSA, and study the performance of these algorithms on two well-studied problem instances from the literature. Both classically and quantumly, the successful control strategy is found to be bang-bang, exponentially outperforming the quasistatic analogues on the same instances. Lastly, we construct O(1)-depth QAOA protocols for a class of symmetric cost functions, and provide an accompanying physical picture.

Beyond Spontaneous Emission: Giant Atom Bounded in Continuum - Shangjie Guo; Yidan Wang; Thomas Purdy; J. M. Taylor (2019)
The quantum coupling of individual superconducting qubits to microwave photons leads to remarkable experimental opportunities. Here we consider the phononic case where the qubit is coupled to an electromagnetic surface acoustic wave antenna that enables supersonic propagation of the qubit oscillations. This can be considered as a giant atom that is many phonon wavelengths long. We study an exactly solvable toy model that captures these effects, and find that this non-Markovian giant atom has a suppressed relaxation, as well as an effective vacuum coupling between a qubit excitation and a localized wave packet of sound, even in the absence of a cavity for the sound waves. Finally, we consider practical implementations of these ideas in current surface acoustic wave devices.

Butterfly effect in interacting Aubry-Andre model: thermalization, slow scrambling, and many-body localization - Shenglong Xu; Xiao Li; Yi-Ting Hsu; Brian Swingle; Sankar Das Sarma (2019)
The many-body localization transition in quasiperiodic systems has been extensively studied in recent ultracold atom experiments. At intermediate quasiperiodic potential strength, a surprising Griffiths-like regime with slow dynamics appears in the absence of random disorder and mobility edges. In this work, we study the interacting Aubry-Andre model, a prototype quasiperiodic system, as a function of incommensurate potential strength using a novel dynamical measure, information scrambling, in a large system of 200 lattice sites. Between the thermal phase and the many-body localized phase, we find an intermediate dynamical phase where the butterfly velocity is zero and information spreads in space as a power-law in time. This is in contrast to the ballistic spreading in the thermal phase and logarithmic spreading in the localized phase. We further investigate the entanglement structure of the many-body eigenstates in the intermediate phase and find strong fluctuations in eigenstate entanglement entropy within a given energy window, which is inconsistent with the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Machine-learning on the entanglement spectrum also reaches the same conclusion. Our large-scale simulations suggest that the intermediate phase with vanishing butterfly velocity could be responsible for the slow dynamics seen in recent experiments.

Canonical forms for single-qutrit Clifford+T operators - Andrew N. Glaudell; Neil J. Ross; J. M. Taylor (Annals of Physics, 2019)
We introduce canonical forms for single qutrit Clifford+T circuits and prove that every single-qutrit Clifford+T operator admits a unique such canonical form. We show that our canonical forms are T-optimal in the sense that among all the single-qutrit Clifford+T circuits implementing a given operator our canonical form uses the least number of T gates. Finally, we provide an algorithm which inputs the description of an operator (as a matrix or a circuit) and constructs the canonical form for this operator. The algorithm runs in time linear in the number of T gates. Our results provide a higher-dimensional generalization of prior work by Matsumoto and Amano who introduced similar canonical forms for single-qubit Clifford+T circuits.

Chaos in a quantum rotor model - Gong Cheng; Brian Swingle (2019)
We study scrambling in a model consisting of a number N of M-component quantum rotors coupled by random infinite-range interactions. This model is known to have both a paramagnetic phase and a spin glass phase separated by second order phase transition. We calculate in perturbation theory the squared commutator of rotor fields at different sites in the paramagnetic phase, to leading non-trivial order at large N and large M. This quantity diagnoses the onset of quantum chaos in this system, and we show that the squared commutator grows exponentially with time, with a Lyapunov exponent proportional to 1M. At high temperature, the Lyapunov exponent limits to a value set by the microscopic couplings, while at low temperature, the exponent exhibits a T4 dependence on temperature T.

A characterization of quantum chaos by two-point correlation functions - Hrant Gharibyan; Masanori Hanada; Brian Swingle; Masaki Tezuka (2019)
We propose a characterization of quantum many-body chaos: given a collection of simple operators, the set of all possible pair-correlations between these operators can be organized into a matrix with random-matrix-like spectrum. This approach is particularly useful for locally interacting systems, which do not generically show exponential Lyapunov growth of out-of-time-ordered correlators. We demonstrate the validity of this characterization by numerically studying the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model and a one-dimensional spin chain with random magnetic field (XXZ model).

Circuit Transformations for Quantum Architectures - Andrew M. Childs; Eddie Schoute; Cem M. Unsal (Proceedings of TQC 2019, LIPIcs, 2019)
Quantum computer architectures impose restrictions on qubit interactions. We propose efficient circuit transformations that modify a given quantum circuit to fit an architecture, allowing for any initial and final mapping of circuit qubits to architecture qubits. To achieve this, we first consider the qubit movement subproblem and use the routing via matchings framework to prove tighter bounds on parallel routing. In practice, we only need to perform partial permutations, so we generalize routing via matchings to that setting. We give new routing procedures for common architecture graphs and for the generalized hierarchical product of graphs, which produces subgraphs of the Cartesian product. Secondly, for serial routing, we consider the token swapping framework and extend a 4-approximation algorithm for general graphs to support partial permutations. We apply these routing procedures to give several circuit transformations, using various heuristic qubit placement subroutines. We implement these transformations in software and compare their performance for large quantum circuits on grid and modular architectures, identifying strategies that work well in practice.

Classifying single-qubit noise using machine learning - Travis L. Scholten; Yi-Kai Liu; Kevin Young; Robin Blume-Kohout (2019)
Quantum characterization, validation, and verification (QCVV) techniques are used to probe, characterize, diagnose, and detect errors in quantum information processors (QIPs). An important component of any QCVV protocol is a mapping from experimental data to an estimate of a property of a QIP. Machine learning (ML) algorithms can help automate the development of QCVV protocols, creating such maps by learning them from training data. We identify the critical components of "machine-learned" QCVV techniques, and present a rubric for developing them. To demonstrate this approach, we focus on the problem of determining whether noise affecting a single qubit is coherent or stochastic (incoherent) using the data sets originally proposed for gate set tomography. We leverage known ML algorithms to train a classifier distinguishing these two kinds of noise. The accuracy of the classifier depends on how well it can approximate the "natural" geometry of the training data. We find GST data sets generated by a noisy qubit can reliably be separated by linear surfaces, although feature engineering can be necessary. We also show the classifier learned by a support vector machine (SVM) is robust under finite-sample noise.

Competing (Semi)-Selfish Miners in Bitcoin - Francisco J. Marmolejo-Cossío; Eric Brigham; Benjamin Sela; Jonathan Katz (2019)
The Bitcoin protocol prescribes certain behavior by the miners who are responsible for maintaining and extending the underlying blockchain; in particular, miners who successfully solve a puzzle, and hence can extend the chain by a block, are supposed to release that block immediately. Eyal and Sirer showed, however, that a selfish miner is incentivized to deviate from the protocol and withhold its blocks under certain conditions. The analysis by Eyal and Sirer, as well as in followup work, considers a single deviating miner (who may control a large fraction of the hashing power in the network) interacting with a remaining pool of honest miners. Here, we extend this analysis to the case where there are multiple (non-colluding) selfish miners. We find that with multiple strategic miners, specific deviations from honest mining by multiple strategic agents can outperform honest mining, even if individually miners would not be incentivised to be dishonest. This previous point effectively renders the Bitcoin protocol to be less secure than previously thought.

Complexity phase diagram for interacting and long-range bosonic Hamiltonians - Nishad Maskara; Abhinav Deshpande; Minh C. Tran; Adam Ehrenberg; Bill Fefferman; Alexey V. Gorshkov (2019)
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in topics at the intersection of many-body physics and complexity theory. Many-body physics aims to understand and classify emergent behavior of systems with a large number of particles, while complexity theory aims to classify computational problems based on how the time required to solve the problem scales as the problem size becomes large. In this work, we use insights from complexity theory to classify phases in interacting many-body systems. Specifically, we demonstrate a "complexity phase diagram" for the Bose-Hubbard model with long-range hopping. This shows how the complexity of simulating time evolution varies according to various parameters appearing in the problem, such as the evolution time, the particle density, and the degree of locality. We find that classification of complexity phases is closely related to upper bounds on the spread of quantum correlations, and protocols to transfer quantum information in a controlled manner. Our work motivates future studies of complexity in many-body systems and its interplay with the associated physical phenomena.

Confined Dynamics in Long-Range Interacting Quantum Spin Chains - Fangli Liu; Rex Lundgren; Paraj Titum; Guido Pagano; Jiehang Zhang; Christopher Monroe; Alexey V. Gorshkov (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019)
We study the quasiparticle excitation and quench dynamics of the one-dimensional transverse-field Ising model with power-law (1/rα) interactions. We find that long-range interactions give rise to a confining potential, which couples pairs of domain walls (kinks) into bound quasiparticles, analogous to mesonic bound states in high-energy physics. We show that these bound states have dramatic consequences for the non-equilibrium dynamics following a global quantum quench, such as suppressed spreading of quantum information and oscillations of order parameters. The masses of these bound states can be read out from the Fourier spectrum of these oscillating order parameters. We then use a two-kink model to qualitatively explain the phenomenon of long-range-interaction-induced confinement. The masses of the bound states predicted by this model are in good quantitative agreement with exact diagonalization results. Moreover, we illustrate that these bound states lead to weak thermalization of local observables for initial states with energy near the bottom of the many-body energy spectrum. Our work is readily applicable to current trapped-ion experiments.

Development of Quantum InterConnects for Next-Generation Information Technologies - David Awschalom; Karl K. Berggren; Hannes Bernien; Sunil Bhave; Lincoln D. Carr; Paul Davids; Sophia E. Economou; Dirk Englund; Andrei Faraon; Marty Fejer; Saikat Guha; Martin V. Gustafsson; et al. (2019)
Just as classical information technology rests on a foundation built of interconnected information-processing systems, quantum information technology (QIT) must do the same. A critical component of such systems is the interconnect, a device or process that allows transfer of information between disparate physical media, for example, semiconductor electronics, individual atoms, light pulses in optical fiber, or microwave fields. While interconnects have been well engineered for decades in the realm of classical information technology, quantum interconnects (QuICs) present special challenges, as they must allow the transfer of fragile quantum states between different physical parts or degrees of freedom of the system. The diversity of QIT platforms (superconducting, atomic, solid-state color center, optical, etc.) that will form a quantum internet poses additional challenges. As quantum systems scale to larger size, the quantum interconnect bottleneck is imminent, and is emerging as a grand challenge for QIT. For these reasons, it is the position of the community represented by participants of the NSF workshop on Quantum Interconnects that accelerating QuIC research is crucial for sustained development of a national quantum science and technology program. Given the diversity of QIT platforms, materials used, applications, and infrastructure required, a convergent research program including partnership between academia, industry and national laboratories is required. This document is a summary from a U.S. National Science Foundation supported workshop held on 31 October - 1 November 2019 in Alexandria, VA. Attendees were charged to identify the scientific and community needs, opportunities, and significant challenges for quantum interconnects over the next 2-5 years.

Equilibration to the non-Abelian thermal state in quantum many-body physics - Nicole Yunger Halpern; Michael E. Beverland; Amir Kalev (2019)
In statistical mechanics, a small system exchanges conserved charges---heat, particles, electric charge, etc.---with a bath. The small system thermalizes to the canonical ensemble, or the grand canonical ensemble, etc., depending on the charges. The charges are usually represented by operators assumed to commute with each other. This assumption was removed within quantum-information-theoretic (QI-theoretic) thermodynamics recently. The small system's long-time state was dubbed "the non-Abelian thermal state (NATS)." We propose an experimental protocol for observing a system thermalize to the NATS. We illustrate with a chain of spins, a subset of which form the system of interest. The conserved charges manifest as spin components. Heisenberg interactions push the charges between the system and the effective bath, the rest of the chain. We predict long-time expectation values, extending the NATS theory from abstract idealization to finite systems that thermalize with finite couplings for finite times. Numerical simulations support the analytics: The system thermalizes to the NATS, rather than to the canonical prediction. Our proposal can be implemented with ultracold atoms, nitrogen-vacancy centers, trapped ions, quantum dots, and perhaps nuclear magnetic resonance. This work introduces noncommuting charges from QI-theoretic thermodynamics into quantum many-body physics: atomic, molecular, and optical physics and condensed matter.

Faster quantum simulation by randomization - Andrew M. Childs; Aaron Ostrander; Yuan Su (Quantum, 2019)
Product formulas can be used to simulate Hamiltonian dynamics on a quantum computer by approximating the exponential of a sum of operators by a product of exponentials of the individual summands. This approach is both straightforward and surprisingly efficient. We show that by simply randomizing how the summands are ordered, one can prove stronger bounds on the quality of approximation and thereby give more efficient simulations. Indeed, we show that these bounds can be asymptotically better than previous bounds that exploit commutation between the summands, despite using much less information about the structure of the Hamiltonian. Numerical evidence suggests that our randomized algorithm may be advantageous even for near-term quantum simulation.

Feshbach resonances in p-wave three-body recombination within Fermi-Fermi mixtures of open-shell 6Li and closed-shell 173Yb atoms - Alaina Green; Hui Li; Jun Hui See Toh; Xinxin Tang; Katherine McCormick; Ming Li; Eite Tiesinga; Svetlana Kotochigova; Subhadeep Gupta (2019)
We report on observations and modeling of interspecies magnetic Feshbach resonances in dilute ultracold mixtures of open-shell alkali-metal 6Li and closed-shell 173Yb atoms with temperatures just above quantum degeneracy for both fermionic species. Resonances are located by detecting magnetic-field-dependent atom loss due to three-body recombination. We resolve closely-located resonances that originate from a weak separation-dependent hyperfine coupling between the electronic spin of 6Li and the nuclear spin of 173Yb, and confirm their magnetic field spacing by ab initio electronic-structure calculations. Through quantitative comparisons of theoretical atom-loss profiles and experimental data at various temperatures between 1 μK and 20 μK, we show that three-body recombination in fermionic mixtures has a p-wave Wigner threshold behavior leading to characteristic asymmetric loss profiles. Such resonances can be applied towards the formation of ultracold doublet ground-state molecules and quantum simulation of superfluid p-wave pairing.

Floquet engineering of optical lattices with spatial features and periodicity below the diffraction limit - S. Subhankar; P. Bienias; P. Titum; T-C. Tsui; Y. Wang; Alexey V. Gorshkov; S. L. Rolston; J. V. Porto (2019)
Floquet engineering or coherent time periodic driving of quantum systems has been successfully used to synthesize Hamiltonians with novel properties. In ultracold atomic systems, this has led to experimental realizations of artificial gauge fields, topological band structures, and observation of dynamical localization, to name just a few. Here we present a Floquet-based framework to stroboscopically engineer Hamiltonians with spatial features and periodicity below the diffraction limit of light used to create them by time-averaging over various configurations of a 1D optical Kronig-Penney (KP) lattice. The KP potential is a lattice of narrow subwavelength barriers spaced by half the optical wavelength (λ/2) and arises from the non-linear optical response of the atomic dark state. Stroboscopic control over the strength and position of this lattice requires time-dependent adiabatic manipulation of the dark state spin composition. We investigate adiabaticity requirements and shape our time-dependent light fields to respect the requirements. We apply this framework to show that a λ/4-spaced lattice can be synthesized using realistic experimental parameters as an example, discuss mechanisms that limit lifetimes in these lattices, explore candidate systems and their limitations, and treat adiabatic loading into the ground band of these lattices.

Fluctuation-induced torque on a topological insulator out of thermal equilibrium - M. F. Maghrebi; Alexey V. Gorshkov; J. D. Sau (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019)
Topological insulators with the time reversal symmetry broken exhibit strong magnetoelectric and magneto-optic effects. While these effects are well-understood in or near equilibrium, nonequilibrium physics is richer yet less explored. We consider a topological insulator thin film, weakly coupled to a ferromagnet, out of thermal equilibrium with a cold environment (quantum electrodynamics vacuum). We show that the heat flow to the environment is strongly circularly polarized, thus carrying away angular momentum and exerting a purely fluctuation-driven torque on the topological insulator film. Utilizing the Keldysh framework, we investigate the universal nonequilibrium response of the TI to the temperature difference with the environment. Finally, we argue that experimental observation of this effect is within reach.

Framework for Hamiltonian simulation and beyond: standard-form encoding, qubitization, and quantum signal processing - Yuan Su (Quantum Views, 2019)
This is a Perspective on "Hamiltonian Simulation by Qubitization" by Guang Hao Low and Isaac L. Chuang, published in Quantum 3, 163 (2019).

Graphical Methods in Device-Independent Quantum Cryptography - Spencer Breiner; Carl Miller; Neil J. Ross (Quantum, 2019)
We introduce a framework for graphical security proofs in device-independent quantum cryptography using the methods of categorical quantum mechanics. We are optimistic that this approach will make some of the highly complex proofs in quantum cryptography more accessible, facilitate the discovery of new proofs, and enable automated proof verification. As an example of our framework, we reprove a recent result from device-independent quantum cryptography: any linear randomness expansion protocol can be converted into an unbounded randomness expansion protocol. We give a graphical exposition of a proof of this result and implement parts of it in the Globular proof assistant.

Ground-state energy estimation of the water molecule on a trapped ion quantum computer - Yunseong Nam; Jwo-Sy Chen; Neal C. Pisenti; Kenneth Wright; Conor Delaney; Dmitri Maslov; Kenneth R. Brown; Stewart Allen; Jason M. Amini; Joel Apisdorf; Kristin M. Beck; Aleksey Blinov; et al. (2019)
Quantum computing leverages the quantum resources of superposition and entanglement to efficiently solve computational problems considered intractable for classical computers. Examples include calculating molecular and nuclear structure, simulating strongly-interacting electron systems, and modeling aspects of material function. While substantial theoretical advances have been made in mapping these problems to quantum algorithms, there remains a large gap between the resource requirements for solving such problems and the capabilities of currently available quantum hardware. Bridging this gap will require a co-design approach, where the expression of algorithms is developed in conjunction with the hardware itself to optimize execution. Here, we describe a scalable co-design framework for solving chemistry problems on a trapped ion quantum computer, and apply it to compute the ground-state energy of the water molecule. The robust operation of the trapped ion quantum computer yields energy estimates with errors approaching the chemical accuracy, which is the target threshold necessary for predicting the rates of chemical reaction dynamics.

Heisenberg-Scaling Measurement Protocol for Analytic Functions with Quantum Sensor Networks - Kevin Qian; Zachary Eldredge; Wenchao Ge; Guido Pagano; Christopher Monroe; James V. Porto; Alexey V. Gorshkov (Phys. Rev. A, 2019)
We generalize past work on quantum sensor networks to show that, for d input parameters, entanglement can yield a factor O(d) improvement in mean squared error when estimating an analytic function of these parameters. We show that the protocol is optimal for qubit sensors, and conjecture an optimal protocol for photons passing through interferometers. Our protocol is also applicable to continuous variable measurements, such as one quadrature of a field operator. We outline a few potential applications, including calibration of laser operations in trapped ion quantum computing.

How Low Can Vacuum Energy Go When Your Fields Are Finite-Dimensional? - ChunJun Cao; Aidan Chatwin-Davies; Ashmeet Singh (2019)
According to the holographic bound, there is only a finite density of degrees of freedom in space when gravity is taken into account. Conventional quantum field theory does not conform to this bound, since in this framework, infinitely many degrees of freedom may be localized to any given region of space. In this essay, we explore the viewpoint that quantum field theory may emerge from an underlying theory that is locally finite-dimensional, and we construct a locally finite-dimensional version of a Klein-Gordon scalar field using generalized Clifford algebras. Demanding that the finite-dimensional field operators obey a suitable version of the canonical commutation relations makes this construction essentially unique. We then find that enforcing local finite dimensionality in a holographically consistent way leads to a huge suppression of the quantum contribution to vacuum energy, to the point that the theoretical prediction becomes plausibly consistent with observations.

Interacting Qubit-Photon Bound States with Superconducting Circuits - Neereja M. Sundaresan; Rex Lundgren; Guanyu Zhu; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Andrew A. Houck (Phys. Rev., 2019)
Qubits strongly coupled to a photonic crystal give rise to many exotic physical scenarios, beginning with single and multi-excitation qubit-photon dressed bound states comprising induced spatially localized photonic modes, centered around the qubits, and the qubits themselves. The localization of these states changes with qubit detuning from the band-edge, offering an avenue of in situ control of bound state interaction. Here, we present experimental results from a device with two qubits coupled to a superconducting microwave photonic crystal and realize tunable on-site and inter-bound state interactions. We observe a fourth-order two photon virtual process between bound states indicating strong coupling between the photonic crystal and qubits. Due to their localization-dependent interaction, these states offer the ability to create one-dimensional chains of bound states with tunable and potentially long-range interactions that preserve the qubits' spatial organization, a key criterion for realization of certain quantum many-body models. The widely tunable, strong and robust interactions demonstrated with this system are promising benchmarks towards realizing larger, more complex systems of bound states.

Interaction-induced transition in the quantum chaotic dynamics of a disordered metal - S. V. Syzranov; Alexey V. Gorshkov; V. M. Galitski (Ann. Phys., 2019)
We demonstrate that a weakly disordered metal with short-range interactions exhibits a transition in the quantum chaotic dynamics when changing the temperature or the interaction strength. For weak interactions, the system displays exponential growth of the out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) of the current operator. The Lyapunov exponent of this growth is temperature-independent in the limit of vanishing interaction. With increasing the temperature or the interaction strength, the system undergoes a transition to a non-chaotic behaviour, for which the exponential growth of the OTOC is absent. We conjecture that the transition manifests itself in the quasiparticle energy-level statistics and also discuss ways of its explicit observation in cold-atom setups.

Interference of Temporally Distinguishable Photons Using Frequency-Resolved Detection - Venkata Vikram Orre; Elizabeth A. Goldschmidt; Abhinav Deshpande; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Vincenzo Tamma; Mohammad Hafezi; Sunil Mittal (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019)
We demonstrate quantum interference of three photons that are distinguishable in time, by resolving them in the conjugate parameter, frequency. We show that the multiphoton interference pattern in our setup can be manipulated by tuning the relative delays between the photons, without the need for reconfiguring the optical network. Furthermore, we observe that the symmetries of our optical network and the spectral amplitude of the input photons are manifested in the interference pattern. Moreover, we demonstrate time-reversed HOM-like interference in the spectral correlations using time-bin entangled photon pairs. By adding a time-varying dispersion using a phase modulator, our setup can be used to realize dynamically reconfigurable and scalable boson sampling in the time domain as well as frequency-resolved multiboson correlation sampling.

Interpreting Neural Networks Using Flip Points - Roozbeh Yousefzadeh; Dianne P. O'Leary (2019)
Neural networks have been criticized for their lack of easy interpretation, which undermines confidence in their use for important applications. Here, we introduce a novel technique, interpreting a trained neural network by investigating its flip points. A flip point is any point that lies on the boundary between two output classes: e.g. for a neural network with a binary yes/no output, a flip point is any input that generates equal scores for "yes" and "no". The flip point closest to a given input is of particular importance, and this point is the solution to a well-posed optimization problem. This paper gives an overview of the uses of flip points and how they are computed. Through results on standard datasets, we demonstrate how flip points can be used to provide detailed interpretation of the output produced by a neural network. Moreover, for a given input, flip points enable us to measure confidence in the correctness of outputs much more effectively than softmax score. They also identify influential features of the inputs, identify bias, and find changes in the input that change the output of the model. We show that distance between an input and the closest flip point identifies the most influential points in the training data. Using principal component analysis (PCA) and rank-revealing QR factorization (RR-QR), the set of directions from each training input to its closest flip point provides explanations of how a trained neural network processes an entire dataset: what features are most important for classification into a given class, which features are most responsible for particular misclassifications, how an adversary might fool the network, etc. Although we investigate flip points for neural networks, their usefulness is actually model-agnostic.

Investigating Decision Boundaries of Trained Neural Networks - Roozbeh Yousefzadeh; Dianne P O'Leary (2019)
Deep learning models have been the subject of study from various perspectives, for example, their training process, interpretation, generalization error, robustness to adversarial attacks, etc. A trained model is defined by its decision boundaries, and therefore, many of the studies about deep learning models speculate about the decision boundaries, and sometimes make simplifying assumptions about them. So far, finding exact points on the decision boundaries of trained deep models has been considered an intractable problem. Here, we compute exact points on the decision boundaries of these models and provide mathematical tools to investigate the surfaces that define the decision boundaries. Through numerical results, we confirm that some of the speculations about the decision boundaries are accurate, some of the computational methods can be improved, and some of the simplifying assumptions may be unreliable, for models with nonlinear activation functions. We advocate for verification of simplifying assumptions and approximation methods, wherever they are used. Finally, we demonstrate that the computational practices used for finding adversarial examples can be improved and computing the closest point on the decision boundary reveals the weakest vulnerability of a model against adversarial attack.

Limitations of semidefinite programs for separable states and entangled games - Aram W. Harrow; Anand Natarajan; Xiaodi Wu (Commun. Math. Phys., 2019)
Semidefinite programs (SDPs) are a framework for exact or approximate optimization that have widespread application in quantum information theory. We introduce a new method for using reductions to construct integrality gaps for SDPs. These are based on new limitations on the sum-of-squares (SoS) hierarchy in approximating two particularly important sets in quantum information theory, where previously no ω(1)-round integrality gaps were known: the set of separable (i.e. unentangled) states, or equivalently, the 2→4 norm of a matrix, and the set of quantum correlations; i.e. conditional probability distributions achievable with local measurements on a shared entangled state. In both cases no-go theorems were previously known based on computational assumptions such as the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) which asserts that 3-SAT requires exponential time to solve. Our unconditional results achieve the same parameters as all of these previous results (for separable states) or as some of the previous results (for quantum correlations). In some cases we can make use of the framework of Lee-Raghavendra-Steurer (LRS) to establish integrality gaps for any SDP, not only the SoS hierarchy. Our hardness result on separable states also yields a dimension lower bound of approximate disentanglers, answering a question of Watrous and Aaronson et al. These results can be viewed as limitations on the monogamy principle, the PPT test, the ability of Tsirelson-type bounds to restrict quantum correlations, as well as the SDP hierarchies of Doherty-Parrilo-Spedalieri, Navascues-Pironio-Acin and Berta-Fawzi-Scholz.

Locality and digital quantum simulation of power-law interactions - Minh C. Tran; Andrew Y. Guo; Yuan Su; James R. Garrison; Zachary Eldredge; Michael Foss-Feig; Andrew M. Childs; Alexey V. Gorshkov (Phys. Rev. X 9, 031006, 2019)
The propagation of information in non-relativistic quantum systems obeys a speed limit known as a Lieb-Robinson bound. We derive a new Lieb-Robinson bound for systems with interactions that decay with distance r as a power law, 1/rα. The bound implies an effective light cone tighter than all previous bounds. Our approach is based on a technique for approximating the time evolution of a system, which was first introduced as part of a quantum simulation algorithm by Haah et al. [arXiv:1801.03922]. To bound the error of the approximation, we use a known Lieb-Robinson bound that is weaker than the bound we establish. This result brings the analysis full circle, suggesting a deep connection between Lieb-Robinson bounds and digital quantum simulation. In addition to the new Lieb-Robinson bound, our analysis also gives an error bound for the Haah et al. quantum simulation algorithm when used to simulate power-law decaying interactions. In particular, we show that the gate count of the algorithm scales with the system size better than existing algorithms when α>3D (where D is the number of dimensions).

Locality and Heating in Periodically Driven, Power-law Interacting Systems - Minh C. Tran; Adam Ehrenberg; Andrew Y. Guo; Paraj Titum; Dmitry A. Abanin; Alexey V. Gorshkov (Phys. Rev. A, 2019)
We study the heating time in periodically driven D-dimensional systems with interactions that decay with the distance r as a power-law 1/rα. Using linear response theory, we show that the heating time is exponentially long as a function of the drive frequency for α>D. For systems that may not obey linear response theory, we use a more general Magnus-like expansion to show the existence of quasi-conserved observables, which imply exponentially long heating time, for α>2D. We also generalize a number of recent state-of-the-art Lieb-Robinson bounds for power-law systems from two-body interactions to k-body interactions and thereby obtain a longer heating time than previously established in the literature. Additionally, we conjecture that the gap between the results from the linear response theory and the Magnus-like expansion does not have physical implications, but is, rather, due to the lack of tight Lieb-Robinson bounds for power-law interactions. We show that the gap vanishes in the presence of a hypothetical, tight bound.

Locality, Quantum Fluctuations, and Scrambling - Shenglong Xu; Brian Swingle (Phys. Rev. X, 2019)
Thermalization of chaotic quantum many-body systems under unitary time evolution is related to the growth in complexity of initially simple Heisenberg operators. Operator growth is a manifestation of information scrambling and can be diagnosed by out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs). However, the behavior of OTOCs of local operators in generic chaotic local Hamiltonians remains poorly understood, with some semiclassical and large N models exhibiting exponential growth of OTOCs and a sharp chaos wavefront and other random circuit models showing a diffusively broadened wavefront. In this paper we propose a unified physical picture for scrambling in chaotic local Hamiltonians. We construct a random time-dependent Hamiltonian model featuring a large N limit where the OTOC obeys a Fisher-Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piskunov (FKPP) type equation and exhibits exponential growth and a sharp wavefront. We show that quantum fluctuations manifest as noise (distinct from the randomness of the couplings in the underlying Hamiltonian) in the FKPP equation and that the noise-averaged OTOC exhibits a cross-over to a diffusively broadened wavefront. At small N we demonstrate that operator growth dynamics, averaged over the random couplings, can be efficiently simulated for all time using matrix product state techniques. To show that time-dependent randomness is not essential to our conclusions, we push our previous matrix product operator methods to very large size and show that data for a time-independent Hamiltonian model are also consistent with a diffusively-broadened wavefront.

Momentum-space entanglement after a quench in one-dimensional disordered fermionic systems - Rex Lundgren; Fangli Liu; Pontus Laurell; Gregory A. Fiete (2019)
We numerically investigate the momentum-space entanglement entropy and entanglement spectrum of the random-dimer model and its generalizations, which circumvent Anderson localization, after a quench in the Hamiltonian parameters. The type of dynamics that occurs depends on whether or not the Fermi level of the initial state is near the energy of the delocalized states present in these models. If the Fermi level of the initial state is near the energy of the delocalized states, we observe an interesting slow logarithmic-like growth of the momentum-space entanglement entropy followed by an eventual saturation. Otherwise, the momentum-space entanglement entropy is found to rapidly saturate. We also find that the momentum-space entanglement spectrum reveals the presence of delocalized states in these models for long times after the quench and the many-body entanglement gap decays logarithmically in time when the Fermi level is near the energy of the delocalized states.

On the nature of the non-equilibrium phase transition in the non-Markovian driven Dicke model - Rex Lundgren; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Mohammad F. Maghrebi (2019)
The Dicke model famously exhibits a phase transition to a superradiant phase with a macroscopic population of photons and is realized in multiple settings in open quantum systems. In this work, we study a variant of the Dicke model where the cavity mode is lossy due to the coupling to a Markovian environment while the atomic mode is coupled to a colored bath. We analytically investigate this model by inspecting its low-frequency behavior via the Schwinger-Keldysh field theory and carefully examine the nature of the corresponding superradiant phase transition. Integrating out the fast modes, we can identify a simple effective theory allowing us to derive analytical expressions for various critical exponents, including those, such as the dynamical critical exponent, that have not been previously considered. We find excellent agreement with previous numerical results when the non-Markovian bath is at zero temperature; however, contrary to these studies, our low-frequency approach reveals that the same exponents govern the critical behavior when the colored bath is at finite temperature unless the chemical potential is zero. Furthermore, we show that the superradiant phase transition is classical in nature, while it is genuinely non-equilibrium. We derive a fractional Langevin equation and conjecture the associated fractional Fokker-Planck equation that capture the system's long-time memory as well as its non-equilibrium behavior. Finally, we consider finite-size effects at the phase transition and identify the finite-size scaling exponents, unlocking a rich behavior in both statics and dynamics of the photonic and atomic observables.

Nearly optimal lattice simulation by product formulas - Andrew M. Childs; Yuan Su (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019)
Product formulas provide a straightforward yet surprisingly efficient approach to quantum simulation. We show that this algorithm can simulate an n-qubit Hamiltonian with nearest-neighbor interactions evolving for time t using only (nt)1+o(1) gates. While it is reasonable to expect this complexity---in particular, this was claimed without rigorous justification by Jordan, Lee, and Preskill---we are not aware of a straightforward proof. Our approach is based on an analysis of the local error structure of product formulas, as introduced by Descombes and Thalhammer and significantly simplified here. We prove error bounds for canonical product formulas, which include well-known constructions such as the Lie-Trotter-Suzuki formulas. We also develop a local error representation for time-dependent Hamiltonian simulation, and we discuss generalizations to periodic boundary conditions, constant-range interactions, and higher dimensions. Combined with a previous lower bound, our result implies that product formulas can simulate lattice Hamiltonians with nearly optimal gate complexity.

New stepsizes for the gradient method - Cong Sun; Jin-Peng Liu (Optim Lett, 2019)
Gradient methods are famous for their simplicity and low complexity, which attract more and more attention for large scale optimization problems. A good stepsize plays an important role to construct an efficient gradient method. This paper proposes a new framework to generate stepsizes for gradient methods applied to convex quadratic function minimization problems. By adopting different criterions, we propose four new gradient methods. For 2-dimensional unconstrained problems with convex quadratic objective functions, we prove that the new methods either terminate in finite iterations or converge R-superlinearly; for n-dimensional problems, we prove that all the new methods converge R-linearly. Numerical experiments show that the new methods enjoy lower complexity and outperform the existing gradient methods.

On non-adaptive quantum chosen-ciphertext attacks and Learning with Errors - Gorjan Alagic; Stacey Jeffery; Maris Ozols; Alexander Poremba (14th Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography, TQC 2019, June 3-5, 2019, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA, 2019)
Large-scale quantum computing is a significant threat to classical public-key cryptography. In strong "quantum access" security models, numerous symmetric-key cryptosystems are also vulnerable. We consider classical encryption in a model which grants the adversary quantum oracle access to encryption and decryption, but where the latter is restricted to non-adaptive (i.e., pre-challenge) queries only. We define this model formally using appropriate notions of ciphertext indistinguishability and semantic security (which are equivalent by standard arguments) and call it QCCA1 in analogy to the classical CCA1 security model. Using a bound on quantum random-access codes, we show that the standard PRF- and PRP-based encryption schemes are QCCA1-secure when instantiated with quantum-secure primitives. We then revisit standard IND-CPA-secure Learning with Errors (LWE) encryption and show that leaking just one quantum decryption query (and no other queries or leakage of any kind) allows the adversary to recover the full secret key with constant success probability. In the classical setting, by contrast, recovering the key uses a linear number of decryption queries, and this is optimal. The algorithm at the core of our attack is a (large-modulus version of) the well-known Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm. We emphasize that our results should *not* be interpreted as a weakness of these cryptosystems in their stated security setting (i.e., post-quantum chosen-plaintext secrecy). Rather, our results mean that, if these cryptosystems are exposed to chosen-ciphertext attacks (e.g., as a result of deployment in an inappropriate real-world setting) then quantum attacks are even more devastating than classical ones.

Nondestructive cooling of an atomic quantum register via state-insensitive Rydberg interactions - Ron Belyansky; Jeremy T. Young; Przemyslaw Bienias; Zachary Eldredge; Adam M. Kaufman; Peter Zoller; Alexey V. Gorshkov (2019)
We propose a protocol for sympathetically cooling neutral atoms without destroying the quantum information stored in their internal states. This is achieved by designing state-insensitive Rydberg interactions between the data-carrying atoms and cold auxiliary atoms. The resulting interactions give rise to an effective phonon coupling, which leads to the transfer of heat from the data atoms to the auxiliary atoms, where the latter can be cooled by conventional methods. This can be used to extend the lifetime of quantum storage based on neutral atoms and can have applications for long quantum computations. The protocol can also be modified to realize state-insensitive interactions between the data and the auxiliary atoms but tunable and non-trivial interactions among the data atoms, allowing one to simultaneously cool and simulate a quantum spin-model.

Number-Theoretic Characterizations of Some Restricted Clifford+T Circuits - Matthew Amy; Andrew N. Glaudell; Neil J. Ross (2019)
Kliuchnikov, Maslov, and Mosca proved in 2012 that a 2×2 unitary matrix V can be exactly represented by a single-qubit Clifford+T circuit if and only if the entries of V belong to the ring Z[1/2–√,i]. Later that year, Giles and Selinger showed that the same restriction applies to matrices that can be exactly represented by a multi-qubit Clifford+T circuit. These number-theoretic characterizations shed new light upon the structure of Clifford+T circuits and led to remarkable developments in the field of quantum compiling. In the present paper, we provide number-theoretic characterizations for certain restricted Clifford+T circuits by considering unitary matrices over subrings of Z[1/2–√,i]. We focus on the subrings Z[1/2], Z[1/2–√], Z[1/-2−−√], and Z[1/2,i], and we prove that unitary matrices with entries in these rings correspond to circuits over well-known universal gate sets. In each case, the desired gate set is obtained by extending the set of classical reversible gates {X,CX,CCX} with an analogue of the Hadamard gate and an optional phase gate.

Observation of Domain Wall Confinement and Dynamics in a Quantum Simulator - W. L. Tan; P. Becker; F. Liu; G. Pagano; K. S. Collins; A. De; L. Feng; H. B. Kaplan; A. Kyprianidis; R. Lundgren; W. Morong; S. Whitsitt; et al. (2019)
Confinement is a ubiquitous mechanism in nature, whereby particles feel an attractive force that increases without bound as they separate. A prominent example is color confinement in particle physics, in which baryons and mesons are produced by quark confinement. Analogously, confinement can also occur in low-energy quantum many-body systems when elementary excitations are confined into bound quasiparticles. Here, we report the first observation of magnetic domain wall confinement in interacting spin chains with a trapped-ion quantum simulator. By measuring how correlations spread, we show that confinement can dramatically suppress information propagation and thermalization in such many-body systems. We are able to quantitatively determine the excitation energy of domain wall bound states from non-equilibrium quench dynamics. Furthermore, we study the number of domain wall excitations created for different quench parameters, in a regime that is difficult to model with classical computers. This work demonstrates the capability of quantum simulators for investigating exotic high-energy physics phenomena, such as quark collision and string breaking

Opportunities for Nuclear Physics & Quantum Information Science - I. C. Cloët; Matthew R. Dietrich; John Arrington; Alexei Bazavov; Michael Bishof; Adam Freese; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Anna Grassellino; Kawtar Hafidi; Zubin Jacob; Michael McGuigan; Yannick Meurice; et al. (2019)
his whitepaper is an outcome of the workshop Intersections between Nuclear Physics and Quantum Information held at Argonne National Laboratory on 28-30 March 2018 [www.phy.anl.gov/npqi2018/]. The workshop brought together 116 national and international experts in nuclear physics and quantum information science to explore opportunities for the two fields to collaborate on topics of interest to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, and more broadly to U.S. society and industry. The workshop consisted of 22 invited and 10 contributed talks, as well as three panel discussion sessions. Topics discussed included quantum computation, quantum simulation, quantum sensing, nuclear physics detectors, nuclear many-body problem, entanglement at collider energies, and lattice gauge theories.

Parallel Self-Testing of the GHZ State with a Proof by Diagrams - Spencer Breiner; Amir Kalev; Carl Miller (EPTCS, 2019)
Quantum self-testing addresses the following question: is it possible to verify the existence of a multipartite state even when one's measurement devices are completely untrusted? This problem has seen abundant activity in the last few years, particularly with the advent of parallel self-testing (i.e., testing several copies of a state at once), which has applications not only to quantum cryptography but also quantum computing. In this work we give the first error-tolerant parallel self-test in a three-party (rather than two-party) scenario, by showing that an arbitrary number of copies of the GHZ state can be self-tested. In order to handle the additional complexity of a three-party setting, we use a diagrammatic proof based on categorical quantum mechanics, rather than a typical symbolic proof. The diagrammatic approach allows for manipulations of the complicated tensor networks that arise in the proof, and gives a demonstration of the importance of picture-languages in quantum information.

Photon pair condensation by engineered dissipation - Ze-Pei Cian; Guanyu Zhu; Su-Kuan Chu; Alireza Seif; Wade DeGottardi; Liang Jiang; Mohammad Hafezi (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019)
Dissipation can usually induce detrimental decoherence in a quantum system. However, engineered dissipation can be used to prepare and stabilize coherent quantum many-body states. Here, we show that by engineering dissipators containing photon pair operators, one can stabilize an exotic dark state, which is a condensate of photon pairs with a phase-nematic order. In this system, the usual superfluid order parameter, i.e. single-photon correlation, is absent, while the photon pair correlation exhibits long-range order. Although the dark state is not unique due to multiple parity sectors, we devise an additional type of dissipators to stabilize the dark state in a particular parity sector via a diffusive annihilation process which obeys Glauber dynamics in an Ising model. Furthermore, we propose an implementation of these photon-pair dissipators in circuit-QED architecture.

Polynomial Time Algorithms for Estimating Spectra of Adiabatic Hamiltonians - Jacob Bringewatt; William Dorland; Stephen P. Jordan (Phys. Rev. A, 2019)
Much research regarding quantum adiabatic optimization has focused on stoquastic Hamiltonians with Hamming symmetric potentials, such as the well studied "spike" example. Due to the large amount of symmetry in these potentials such problems are readily open to analysis both analytically and computationally. However, more realistic potentials do not have such a high degree of symmetry and may have many local minima. Here we present a somewhat more realistic class of problems consisting of many individually Hamming symmetric potential wells. For two or three such wells we demonstrate that such a problem can be solved exactly in time polynomial in the number of qubits and wells. For greater than three wells, we present a tight binding approach with which to efficiently analyze the performance of such Hamiltonians in an adiabatic computation. We provide several basic examples designed to highlight the usefulness of this toy model and to give insight into using the tight binding approach to examining it, including: (1) adiabatic unstructured search with a transverse field driver and a prior guess to the marked item and (2) a scheme for adiabatically simulating the ground states of small collections of strongly interacting spins, with an explicit demonstration for an Ising model Hamiltonian.

A Probabilistic Framework and a Homotopy Method for Real-time Hierarchical Freight Dispatch Decisions - Roozbeh Yousefzadeh; Dianne P. O'Leary (2019)
We propose a real-time decision framework for multimodal freight dispatch through a system of hierarchical hubs, using a probabilistic model for transit times. Instead of assigning a fixed time to each transit, we advocate using historical records to identify characteristics of the probability density function for each transit time. We formulate a nonlinear optimization problem that defines dispatch decisions that minimize expected cost, using this probabilistic information. Finally, we propose an effective homotopy algorithm that (empirically) outperforms standard optimization algorithms on this problem by taking advantage of its structure, and we demonstrate its effectiveness on numerical examples.

Probing ground-state phase transitions through quench dynamics - Paraj Titum; Joseph T. Iosue; James R. Garrison; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Zhe-Xuan Gong (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019)
The study of quantum phase transitions requires the preparation of a many-body system near its ground state, a challenging task for many experimental systems. The measurement of quench dynamics, on the other hand, is now a routine practice in most cold atom platforms. Here we show that quintessential ingredients of quantum phase transitions can be probed directly with quench dynamics in integrable and nearly integrable systems. As a paradigmatic example, we study global quench dynamics in a transverse-field Ising model with either short-range or long-range interactions. When the model is integrable, we discover a new dynamical critical point with a non-analytic signature in the short-range correlators. The location of the dynamical critical point matches that of the quantum critical point and can be identified using a finite-time scaling method. We extend this scaling picture to systems near integrability and demonstrate the continued existence of a dynamical critical point detectable at prethermal time scales. Therefore, our method can be used to approximately locate the quantum critical point. The scaling method is also relevant to experiments with finite time and system size, and our predictions are testable in near-term experiments with trapped ions and Rydberg atoms.

Product Spectrum Ansatz and the Simplicity of Thermal States - John Martyn; Brian Swingle (Phys. Rev. A, 2019)
Calculating the physical properties of quantum thermal states is a difficult problem for classical computers, rendering it intractable for most quantum many-body systems. A quantum computer, by contrast, would make many of these calculations feasible in principle, but it is still non-trivial to prepare a given thermal state or sample from it. It is also not known how to prepare special simple purifications of thermal states known as thermofield doubles, which play an important role in quantum many-body physics and quantum gravity. To address this problem, we propose a variational scheme to prepare approximate thermal states on a quantum computer by applying a series of two-qubit gates to a product mixed state. We apply our method to a non-integrable region of the mixed field Ising chain and the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. We also demonstrate how our method can be easily extended to large systems governed by local Hamiltonians and the preparation of thermofield double states. By comparing our results with exact solutions, we find that our construction enables the efficient preparation of approximate thermal states on quantum devices. Our results can be interpreted as implying that the details of the many-body energy spectrum are not needed to capture simple thermal observables.

Programmable Quantum Simulations of Spin Systems with Trapped Ions - C. Monroe; W. C. Campbell; L. -M. Duan; Z. -X. Gong; Alexey V. Gorshkov; P. Hess; R. Islam; K. Kim; G. Pagano; P. Richerme; C. Senko; N. Y. Yao (2019)
Laser-cooled and trapped atomic ions form an ideal standard for the simulation of interacting quantum spin models. Effective spins are represented by appropriate internal energy levels within each ion, and the spins can be measured with near-perfect efficiency using state-dependent fluorescence techniques. By applying optical fields that exert optical dipole forces on the ions, their Coulomb interaction can be modulated in ways that give rise to long-range and tunable spin-spin interactions that can be reconfigured by shaping the spectrum and pattern of the laser fields. Here we review the theoretical mapping of atomic ions to interacting spin systems, the experimental preparation of complex equilibrium states, and the study of dynamical processes of this many-body interacting quantum system. The use of such quantum simulators for studying spin models may inform our understanding of exotic quantum materials and shed light on interacting quantum systems that cannot be modeled with conventional computers.

Quantifying the magic of quantum channels - Xin Wang; Mark M. Wilde; Yuan Su (New Journal of Physics, 2019)
To achieve universal quantum computation via general fault-tolerant schemes, stabilizer operations must be supplemented with other non-stabilizer quantum resources. Motivated by this necessity, we develop a resource theory for magic quantum channels to characterize and quantify the quantum "magic" or non-stabilizerness of noisy quantum circuits. For qudit quantum computing with odd dimension d, it is known that quantum states with non-negative Wigner function can be efficiently simulated classically. First, inspired by this observation, we introduce a resource theory based on completely positive-Wigner-preserving quantum operations as free operations, and we show that they can be efficiently simulated via a classical algorithm. Second, we introduce two efficiently computable magic measures for quantum channels, called the mana and thauma of a quantum channel. As applications, we show that these measures not only provide fundamental limits on the distillable magic of quantum channels, but they also lead to lower bounds for the task of synthesizing non-Clifford gates. Third, we propose a classical algorithm for simulating noisy quantum circuits, whose sample complexity can be quantified by the mana of a quantum channel. We further show that this algorithm can outperform another approach for simulating noisy quantum circuits, based on channel robustness. Finally, we explore the threshold of non-stabilizerness for basic quantum circuits under depolarizing noise.

Quantum Algorithm for Simulating the Wave Equation - Pedro C.S. Costa; Stephen P. Jordan; Aaron Ostrander (Phys. Rev. A, 2019)
We present a quantum algorithm for simulating the wave equation under Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. The algorithm uses Hamiltonian simulation and quantum linear system algorithms as subroutines. It relies on factorizations of discretized Laplacian operators to allow for improved scaling in truncation errors and improved scaling for state preparation relative to general purpose linear differential equation algorithms. We also consider using Hamiltonian simulation for Klein-Gordon equations and Maxwell's equations.

Quantum Approximate Optimization with a Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulator - G. Pagano; A. Bapat; P. Becker; K. S. Collins; A. De; P. W. Hess; H. B. Kaplan; A. Kyprianidis; W. L. Tan; Christopher L. Baldwin; L. T. Brady; A. Deshpande; et al. (2019)
Quantum computers and simulators may offer significant advantages over their classical counterparts, providing insights into quantum many-body systems and possibly solving exponentially hard problems, such as optimization and satisfiability. Here we report the first implementation of a shallow-depth Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) using an analog quantum simulator to estimate the ground state energy of the transverse field Ising model with tunable long-range interactions. First, we exhaustively search the variational control parameters to approximate the ground state energy with up to 40 trapped-ion qubits. We then interface the quantum simulator with a classical algorithm to more efficiently find the optimal set of parameters that minimizes the resulting energy of the system. We finally sample from the full probability distribution of the QAOA output with single-shot and efficient measurements of every qubit.

Quantum circuit approximations and entanglement renormalization for the Dirac field in 1+1 dimensions - Freek Witteveen; Volkher Scholz; Brian Swingle; Michael Walter (2019)
The multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz describes quantum many-body states by a hierarchical entanglement structure organized by length scale. Numerically, it has been demonstrated to capture critical lattice models and the data of the corresponding conformal field theories with high accuracy. However, a rigorous understanding of its success and precise relation to the continuum is still lacking. To address this challenge, we provide an explicit construction of entanglement-renormalization quantum circuits that rigorously approximate correlation functions of the massless Dirac conformal field theory. We directly target the continuum theory: discreteness is introduced by our choice of how to probe the system, not by any underlying short-distance lattice regulator. To achieve this, we use multiresolution analysis from wavelet theory to obtain an approximation scheme and to implement entanglement renormalization in a natural way. This could be a starting point for constructing quantum circuit approximations for more general conformal field theories.

Quantum Computer Systems for Scientific Discovery - Yuri Alexeev; Dave Bacon; Kenneth R. Brown; Robert Calderbank; Lincoln D. Carr; Frederic T. Chong; Brian DeMarco; Dirk Englund; Edward Farhi; Bill Fefferman; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Andrew Houck; et al. (2019)
The great promise of quantum computers comes with the dual challenges of building them and finding their useful applications. We argue that these two challenges should be considered together, by co-designing full stack quantum computer systems along with their applications in order to hasten their development and potential for scientific discovery. In this context, we identify scientific and community needs, opportunities, and significant challenges for the development of quantum computers for science over the next 2-10 years. This document is written by a community of university, national laboratory, and industrial researchers in the field of Quantum Information Science and Technology, and is based on a summary from a U.S. National Science Foundation workshop on Quantum Computing held on October 21-22, 2019 in Alexandria, VA.

Quantum Computing at the Frontiers of Biological Sciences - Prashant S. Emani; Jonathan Warrell; Alan Anticevic; Stefan Bekiranov; Michael Gandal; Michael J. McConnell; Guillermo Sapiro; Alán Aspuru-Guzik; Justin Baker; Matteo Bastiani; Patrick McClure; John Murray; et al. (2019)
The search for meaningful structure in biological data has relied on cutting-edge advances in computational technology and data science methods. However, challenges arise as we push the limits of scale and complexity in biological problems. Innovation in massively parallel, classical computing hardware and algorithms continues to address many of these challenges, but there is a need to simultaneously consider new paradigms to circumvent current barriers to processing speed. Accordingly, we articulate a view towards quantum computation and quantum information science, where algorithms have demonstrated potential polynomial and exponential computational speedups in certain applications, such as machine learning. The maturation of the field of quantum computing, in hardware and algorithm development, also coincides with the growth of several collaborative efforts to address questions across length and time scales, and scientific disciplines. We use this coincidence to explore the potential for quantum computing to aid in one such endeavor: the merging of insights from genetics, genomics, neuroimaging and behavioral phenotyping. By examining joint opportunities for computational innovation across fields, we highlight the need for a common language between biological data analysis and quantum computing. Ultimately, we consider current and future prospects for the employment of quantum computing algorithms in the biological sciences.

Quantum Gravity in the Lab: Teleportation by Size and Traversable Wormholes - Adam R. Brown; Hrant Gharibyan; Stefan Leichenauer; Henry W. Lin; Sepehr Nezami; Grant Salton; Leonard Susskind; Brian Swingle; Michael Walter (2019)
With the long-term goal of studying quantum gravity in the lab, we propose holographic teleportation protocols that can be readily executed in table-top experiments. These protocols exhibit similar behavior to that seen in recent traversable wormhole constructions: information that is scrambled into one half of an entangled system will, following a weak coupling between the two halves, unscramble into the other half. We introduce the concept of "teleportation by size" to capture how the physics of operator-size growth naturally leads to information transmission. The transmission of a signal through a semi-classical holographic wormhole corresponds to a rather special property of the operator-size distribution we call "size winding". For more general setups (which may not have a clean emergent geometry), we argue that imperfect size winding is a generalization of the traversable wormhole phenomenon. For example, a form of signalling continues to function at high temperature and at large times for generic chaotic systems, even though it does not correspond to a signal going through a geometrical wormhole, but rather to an interference effect involving macroscopically different emergent geometries. Finally, we outline implementations feasible with current technology in two experimental platforms: Rydberg atom arrays and trapped ions.

Quantum hardness of learning shallow classical circuits - Srinivasan Arunachalam; Alex B. Grilo; Aarthi Sundaram (2019)
In this paper we study the quantum learnability of constant-depth classical circuits under the uniform distribution and in the distribution-independent framework of PAC learning. In order to attain our results, we establish connections between quantum learning and quantum-secure cryptosystems. We then achieve the following results. 1) Hardness of learning AC0 and TC0 under the uniform distribution. Our first result concerns the concept class TC0 (resp. AC0), the class of constant-depth and polynomial-sized circuits with unbounded fan-in majority gates (resp. AND, OR, NOT gates). We show that if there exists no quantum polynomial-time (resp. sub-exponential time) algorithm to solve the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem, then there exists no polynomial-time quantum learning algorithm for TC0 (resp. AC0) under the uniform distribution (even with access to quantum membership queries). The main technique in this result uses explicit pseudo-random generators that are believed to be quantum-secure to construct concept classes that are hard to learn quantumly under the uniform distribution. 2) Hardness of learning TC02 in the PAC setting. Our second result shows that if there exists no quantum polynomial time algorithm for the LWE problem, then there exists no polynomial time quantum PAC learning algorithm for the class TC02, i.e., depth-2 TC0 circuits. The main technique in this result is to establish a connection between the quantum security of public-key cryptosystems and the learnability of a concept class that consists of decryption functions of the cryptosystem. This gives a strong conditional negative answer to one of the "Ten Semi-Grand Challenges for Quantum Computing Theory" raised by Aaronson [Aar05], who asked if AC0 and TC0 can be PAC-learned in quantum polynomial time.

Quantum Lyapunov Spectrum - Hrant Gharibyan; Masanori Hanada; Brian Swingle; Masaki Tezuka (JHEP04, 2019)
We introduce a simple quantum generalization of the spectrum of classical Lyapunov exponents. We apply it to the SYK and XXZ models, and study the Lyapunov growth and entropy production. Our numerical results suggest that a black hole is not just the fastest scrambler, but also the fastest entropy generator. We also study the statistical features of the quantum Lyapunov spectrum and find universal random matrix behavior, which resembles the recently-found universality in classical chaos. The random matrix behavior is lost when the system is deformed away from chaos, towards integrability or a many-body localized phase. We propose that quantum systems holographically dual to gravity satisfy this universality in a strong form. We further argue that the quantum Lyapunov spectrum contains important additional information beyond the largest Lyapunov exponent and hence provides us with a better characterization of chaos in quantum systems.

Quantum Physics Meets Music: A "Real-Time" Guitar Recording Using Rydberg-Atoms and Electromagnetically Induced Transparency - Christopher L. Holloway; Matthew T. Simons; Abdulaziz H. Haddab; Carl J. Williams; Maxwell W. Holloway (2019)
We demonstrate how Rydberg atoms and the phenomena of electromagnetically induced transparency can be used to aid in the recording of a musical instrument in real time as it is played. Also, by using two different atomic species (cesium and rubidium) in the same vapor cell, we demonstrate the ability to record two guitars simultaneously, where each atomic species detects and allows for the recording of each guitar separately. The approach shows how audio data (the musical composition) can be detected with a quantum system, illustrating how we can control ensembles of atoms to such an extent that we can use them in this "entertaining" example of recording a musical instrument.

Quantum query complexity of entropy estimation - Tongyang Li; Xiaodi Wu (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2019)
Estimation of Shannon and R´enyi entropies of unknown discrete distributions is a fundamental problem in statistical property testing and an active research topic in both theoretical computer science and information theory. Tight bounds on the number of samples to estimate these entropies have been established in the classical setting, while little is known about their quantum counterparts. In this paper, we give the first quantum algorithms for estimating α- R´enyi entropies (Shannon entropy being 1-Renyi entropy). In particular, we demonstrate a quadratic quantum speedup for Shannon entropy estimation and a generic quantum speedup for α-R´enyi entropy estimation for all α ≥ 0, including a tight bound for the collision-entropy (2-R´enyi entropy). We also provide quantum upper bounds for extreme cases such as the Hartley entropy (i.e., the logarithm of the support size of a distribution, corresponding to α = 0) and the min-entropy case (i.e., α = +∞), as well as the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two distributions. Moreover, we complement our results with quantum lower bounds on α-R´enyi entropy estimation for all α ≥ 0. Our approach is inspired by the pioneering work of Bravyi, Harrow, and Hassidim (BHH) [13] on quantum algorithms for distributional property testing, however, with many new technical ingredients. For Shannon entropy and 0-R´enyi entropy estimation, we improve the performance of the BHH framework, especially its error dependence, using Montanaro’s approach to estimating the expected output value of a quantum subroutine with bounded variance [41] and giving a fine-tuned error analysis. For general α-R´enyi entropy estimation, we further develop a procedure that recursively approximates α-R´enyi entropy for a sequence of αs, which is in spirit similar to a cooling schedule in simulated annealing. For special cases such as integer α ≥ 2 and α = +∞ (i.e., the min-entropy), we reduce the entropy estimation problem to the α-distinctness and the dlog ne-distinctness problems, respectively. We exploit various techniques to obtain our lower bounds for different ranges of α, including reductions to (variants of) existing lower bounds in quantum query complexity as well as the polynomial method inspired by the celebrated quantum lower bound for the collision problem.

Quantum repeaters based on two species trapped ions - Siddhartha Santra; Sreraman Muralidharan; Martin Lichtman; Liang Jiang; Christopher Monroe; Vladimir S. Malinovsky (New J. Phys., 2019)
We examine the viability of quantum repeaters based on two-species trapped ion modules for long distance quantum key distribution. Repeater nodes comprised of ion-trap modules of co-trapped ions of distinct species are considered. The species used for communication qubits has excellent optical properties while the other longer lived species serves as a memory qubit in the modules. Each module interacts with the network only via single photons emitted by the communication ions. Coherent Coulomb interaction between ions is utilized to transfer quantum information between the communication and memory ions and to achieve entanglement swapping between two memory ions. We describe simple modular quantum repeater architectures realizable with the ion-trap modules and numerically study the dependence of the quantum key distribution rate on various experimental parameters, including coupling efficiency, gate infidelity, operation time and length of the elementary links. Our analysis suggests crucial improvements necessary in a physical implementation for co-trapped two-species ions to be a competitive platform in long-distance quantum communication.

Quantum Simulators: Architectures and Opportunities - Ehud Altman; Kenneth R. Brown; Giuseppe Carleo; Lincoln D. Carr; Eugene Demler; Cheng Chin; Brian DeMarco; Sophia E. Economou; Mark A. Eriksson; Kai-Mei C. Fu; Markus Greiner; Kaden R. A. Hazzard; et al. (2019)
Quantum simulators are a promising technology on the spectrum of quantum devices from specialized quantum experiments to universal quantum computers. These quantum devices utilize entanglement and many-particle behaviors to explore and solve hard scientific, engineering, and computational problems. Rapid development over the last two decades has produced more than 300 quantum simulators in operation worldwide using a wide variety of experimental platforms. Recent advances in several physical architectures promise a golden age of quantum simulators ranging from highly optimized special purpose simulators to flexible programmable devices. These developments have enabled a convergence of ideas drawn from fundamental physics, computer science, and device engineering. They have strong potential to address problems of societal importance, ranging from understanding vital chemical processes, to enabling the design of new materials with enhanced performance, to solving complex computational problems. It is the position of the community, as represented by participants of the NSF workshop on "Programmable Quantum Simulators," that investment in a national quantum simulator program is a high priority in order to accelerate the progress in this field and to result in the first practical applications of quantum machines. Such a program should address two areas of emphasis: (1) support for creating quantum simulator prototypes usable by the broader scientific community, complementary to the present universal quantum computer effort in industry; and (2) support for fundamental research carried out by a blend of multi-investigator, multi-disciplinary collaborations with resources for quantum simulator software, hardware, and education.

Quantum Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks - Shouvanik Chakrabarti; Yiming Huang; Tongyang Li; Soheil Feizi; Xiaodi Wu (Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2019)
The study of quantum generative models is well-motivated, not only because of its importance in quantum machine learning and quantum chemistry but also because of the perspective of its implementation on near-term quantum machines. Inspired by previous studies on the adversarial training of classical and quantum generative models, we propose the first design of quantum Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGANs), which has been shown to improve the robustness and the scalability of the adversarial training of quantum generative models even on noisy quantum hardware. Specifically, we propose a definition of the Wasserstein semimetric between quantum data, which inherits a few key theoretical merits of its classical counterpart. We also demonstrate how to turn the quantum Wasserstein semimetric into a concrete design of quantum WGANs that can be efficiently implemented on quantum machines. Our numerical study, via classical simulation of quantum systems, shows the more robust and scalable numerical performance of our quantum WGANs over other quantum GAN proposals. As a surprising application, our quantum WGAN has been used to generate a 3-qubit quantum circuit of ~50 gates that well approximates a 3-qubit 1-d Hamiltonian simulation circuit that requires over 10k gates using standard techniques.

Quantum-inspired classical sublinear-time algorithm for solving low-rank semidefinite programming via sampling approaches - Nai-Hui Chia; Tongyang Li; Han-Hsuan Lin; Chunhao Wang (2019)
Semidefinite programming (SDP) is a central topic in mathematical optimization with extensive studies on its efficient solvers. Recently, quantum algorithms with superpolynomial speedups for solving SDPs have been proposed assuming access to its constraint matrices in quantum superposition. Mutually inspired by both classical and quantum SDP solvers, in this paper we present a sublinear classical algorithm for solving low-rank SDPs which is asymptotically as good as existing quantum algorithms. Specifically, given an SDP with m constraint matrices, each of dimension n and rank poly(logn), our algorithm gives a succinct description and any entry of the solution matrix in time O(m⋅poly(logn,1/ε)) given access to a sample-based low-overhead data structure of the constraint matrices, where ε is the precision of the solution. In addition, we apply our algorithm to a quantum state learning task as an application. Technically, our approach aligns with both the SDP solvers based on the matrix multiplicative weight (MMW) framework and the recent studies of quantum-inspired machine learning algorithms. The cost of solving SDPs by MMW mainly comes from the exponentiation of Hermitian matrices, and we propose two new technical ingredients (compared to previous sample-based algorithms) for this task that may be of independent interest: ∙ Weighted sampling: assuming sampling access to each individual constraint matrix A1,…,Aτ, we propose a procedure that gives a good approximation of A=A1+⋯+Aτ. ∙ Symmetric approximation: we propose a sampling procedure that gives low-rank spectral decomposition of a Hermitian matrix A. This improves upon previous sampling procedures that only give low-rank singular value decompositions, losing the signs of eigenvalues.

Quenched vs Annealed: Glassiness from SK to SYK - Christopher L. Baldwin; Brian Swingle (2019)
We show that any SYK-like model with finite-body interactions among local degrees of freedom, e.g., bosons or spins, has a fundamental difference from the standard fermionic model: the former fails to be described by an annealed free energy at low temperature. In this respect, such models more closely resemble spin glasses. We demonstrate this by two means: first, a general theorem proving that the annealed free energy is divergent at low temperature in any model with a tensor product Hilbert space; and second, a replica treatment of two prominent examples which exhibit phase transitions from an "annealed" phase to a "non-annealed" phase as a function of temperature. We further show that this effect appears only at O(N)'th order in a 1/N expansion, even though lower-order terms misleadingly seem to converge. Our results prove that the non-bosonic nature of the particles in SYK is an essential ingredient for its physics, highlight connections between local models and spin glasses, and raise important questions as to the role of fermions and/or glassiness in holography.

Real-time dynamics of string breaking in quantum spin chains - Roberto Verdel; Fangli Liu; Seth Whitsitt; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Markus Heyl (2019)
String breaking is a central dynamical process in theories featuring confinement, where a string connecting two charges decays at the expense of the creation of new particle-antiparticle pairs. Here, we show that this process can also be observed in quantum Ising chains where domain walls get confined either by a symmetry-breaking field or by long-range interactions. We find that string breaking occurs, in general, as a two-stage process: First, the initial charges remain essentially static and stable. The connecting string, however, can become a dynamical object. We develop an effective description of this motion, which we find is strongly constrained. In the second stage, which can be severely delayed due to these dynamical constraints, the string finally breaks. We observe that the associated time scale can depend crucially on the initial separation between domain walls and can grow by orders of magnitude by changing the distance by just a few lattice sites. We discuss how our results generalize to one-dimensional confining gauge theories and how they can be made accessible in quantum simulator experiments such as Rydberg atoms or trapped ions.

Refining the Structure of Neural Networks Using Matrix Conditioning - Roozbeh Yousefzadeh; Dianne P O'Leary (2019)
Deep learning models have proven to be exceptionally useful in performing many machine learning tasks. However, for each new dataset, choosing an effective size and structure of the model can be a time-consuming process of trial and error. While a small network with few neurons might not be able to capture the intricacies of a given task, having too many neurons can lead to overfitting and poor generalization. Here, we propose a practical method that employs matrix conditioning to automatically design the structure of layers of a feed-forward network, by first adjusting the proportion of neurons among the layers of a network and then scaling the size of network up or down. Results on sample image and non-image datasets demonstrate that our method results in small networks with high accuracies. Finally, guided by matrix conditioning, we provide a method to effectively squeeze models that are already trained. Our techniques reduce the human cost of designing deep learning models and can also reduce training time and the expense of using neural networks for applications.

ReQWIRE: Reasoning about Reversible Quantum Circuits - Robert Rand; Jennifer Paykin; Dong-Ho Lee; Steve Zdancewic (EPTCS, 2019)
Common quantum algorithms make heavy use of ancillae: scratch qubits that are initialized at some state and later returned to that state and discarded. Existing quantum circuit languages let programmers assert that a qubit has been returned to the |0> state before it is discarded, allowing for a range of optimizations. However, existing languages do not provide the tools to verify these assertions, introducing a potential source of errors. In this paper we present methods for verifying that ancillae are discarded in the desired state, and use these methods to implement a verified compiler from classical functions to quantum oracles.

Resource theory of asymmetric distinguishability for quantum channels - Xin Wang; Mark M. Wilde (2019)
This paper develops the resource theory of asymmetric distinguishability for quantum channels, generalizing the related resource theory for states [arXiv:1006.0302, arXiv:1905.11629]. The key constituents of the channel resource theory are quantum channel boxes, consisting of a pair of quantum channels, which can be manipulated for free by means of an arbitrary quantum superchannel (the most general physical transformation of a quantum channel). One main question of the resource theory is the approximate channel box transformation problem, in which the goal is to transform an initial channel box (or boxes) to a final channel box (or boxes), while allowing for an asymmetric error in the transformation. The channel resource theory is richer than its counterpart for states because there is a wider variety of ways in which this question can be framed, either in the one-shot or n-shot regimes, with the latter having parallel and sequential variants. As in [arXiv:1905.11629], we consider two special cases of the general channel box transformation problem, known as distinguishability distillation and dilution. For the one-shot case, we find that the optimal values of the various tasks are equal to the non-smooth or smooth channel min- or max-relative entropies, thus endowing all of these quantities with operational interpretations. In the asymptotic sequential setting, we prove that the exact distinguishability cost is equal to channel max-relative entropy and the distillable distinguishability is equal to the amortized channel relative entropy of [arXiv:1808.01498]. This latter result can also be understood as a solution to Stein's lemma for quantum channels in the sequential setting. Finally, the theory simplifies significantly for environment-seizable and classical--quantum channel boxes.

Resource theory of entanglement for bipartite quantum channels - Stefan Bäuml; Siddhartha Das; Xin Wang; Mark M. Wilde (2019)
The traditional perspective in quantum resource theories concerns how to use free operations to convert one resourceful quantum state to another one. For example, a fundamental and well known question in entanglement theory is to determine the distillable entanglement of a bipartite state, which is equal to the maximum rate at which fresh Bell states can be distilled from many copies of a given bipartite state by employing local operations and classical communication for free. It is the aim of this paper to take this kind of question to the next level, with the main question being: What is the best way of using free channels to convert one resourceful quantum channel to another? Here we focus on the the resource theory of entanglement for bipartite channels and establish several fundamental tasks and results regarding it. In particular, we establish bounds on several pertinent information processing tasks in channel entanglement theory, and we define several entanglement measures for bipartite channels, including the logarithmic negativity and the κ-entanglement. We also show that the max-Rains information of [Bäuml et al., Physical Review Letters, 121, 250504 (2018)] has a divergence interpretation, which is helpful for simplifying the results of this earlier work.

Scale-Invariant Continuous Entanglement Renormalization of a Chern Insulator - Su-Kuan Chu; Guanyu Zhu; James R. Garrison; Zachary Eldredge; Ana Valdés Curiel; Przemyslaw Bienias; I. B. Spielman; Alexey V. Gorshkov (Phys. Rev. Lett, 2019)
The multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) postulates the existence of quantum circuits that renormalize entanglement in real space at different length scales. Chern insulators, however, cannot have scale-invariant discrete MERA circuits with finite bond dimension. In this Letter, we show that the continuous MERA (cMERA), a modified version of MERA adapted for field theories, possesses a fixed point wavefunction with nonzero Chern number. Additionally, it is well known that reversed MERA circuits can be used to prepare quantum states efficiently in time that scales logarithmically with the size of the system. However, state preparation via MERA typically requires the advent of a full-fledged universal quantum computer. In this Letter, we demonstrate that our cMERA circuit can potentially be realized in existing analog quantum computers, i.e., an ultracold atomic Fermi gas in an optical lattice with light-induced spin-orbit coupling.

Simulating quantum circuits by classical circuits - Daochen Wang (2019)
In a recent breakthrough, Bravyi, Gosset and König (BGK) [Science, 2018] proved that "simulating" constant depth quantum circuits takes classical circuits Ω(logn) depth. In our paper, we first formalise their notion of simulation, which we call "possibilistic simulation". Then, from well-known results, we deduce that their circuits can be simulated in depth O(log2n). Separately, we construct explicit classical circuits that can simulate any depth-d quantum circuit with Clifford and t T-gates in depth O(d+t). Our classical circuits use {NOT, AND, OR} gates of fan-in ≤2.

Site-by-site quantum state preparation algorithm for preparing vacua of fermionic lattice field theories - Ali Hamed Moosavian; James R. Garrison; Stephen P. Jordan (2019)
Answering whether quantum computers can efficiently simulate quantum field theories has both theoretical and practical motivation. From the theoretical point of view, it answers the question of whether a hypothetical computer that utilizes quantum field theory would be more powerful than other quantum computers. From the practical point of view, when reliable quantum computers are eventually built, these algorithms can help us better understand the underlying physics that govern our world. In the best known quantum algorithms for simulating quantum field theories, the time scaling is dominated by initial state preparation. In this paper, we exclusively focus on state preparation and present a heuristic algorithm that can prepare the vacuum of fermionic systems in more general cases and more efficiently than previous methods. With our method, state preparation is no longer the bottleneck, as its runtime has the same asymptotic scaling with the desired precision as the remainder of the simulation algorithm. We numerically demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for the 1+1 dimensional Gross-Neveu model.

The Speed of Quantum Information Spreading in Chaotic Systems - Josiah Couch; Stefan Eccles; Phuc Nguyen; Brian Swingle; Shenglong Xu (2019)
We present a general theory of quantum information propagation in chaotic quantum many-body systems. The generic expectation in such systems is that quantum information does not propagate in localized form; instead, it tends to spread out and scramble into a form that is inaccessible to local measurements. To characterize this spreading, we define an information speed via a quench-type experiment and derive a general formula for it as a function of the entanglement density of the initial state. As the entanglement density varies from zero to one, the information speed varies from the entanglement speed to the butterfly speed. We verify that the formula holds both for a quantum chaotic spin chain and in field theories with an AdS/CFT gravity dual. For the second case, we study in detail the dynamics of entanglement in two-sided Vaidya-AdS-Reissner-Nordstrom black branes. We also show that, with an appropriate decoding process, quantum information can be construed as moving at the information speed, and, in the case of AdS/CFT, we show that a locally detectable signal propagates at the information speed in a spatially local variant of the traversable wormhole setup.

Statistical Privacy in Distributed Average Consensus on Bounded Real Inputs - Nirupam Gupta; Jonathan Katz; Nikhil Chopra (2019)
This paper proposes a privacy protocol for distributed average consensus algorithms on bounded real-valued inputs that guarantees statistical privacy of honest agents' inputs against colluding (passive adversarial) agents, if the set of colluding agents is not a vertex cut in the underlying communication network. This implies that privacy of agents' inputs is preserved against t number of arbitrary colluding agents if the connectivity of the communication network is at least (t+1). A similar privacy protocol has been proposed for the case of bounded integral inputs in our previous paper~\cite{gupta2018information}. However, many applications of distributed consensus concerning distributed control or state estimation deal with real-valued inputs. Thus, in this paper we propose an extension of the privacy protocol in~\cite{gupta2018information}, for bounded real-valued agents' inputs, where bounds are known apriori to all the agents.

Status Report on the First Round of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process - Gorjan Alagic; J. Alperin-Sheriff; D. Apon; D. Cooper; Q. Dang; Carl Miller; D. Moody; R. Peralta; R. Perlner; A. Robinson; D. Smith-Tone; Yi-Kai Liu (School: National Institute for Standards and Technology, 2019)
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is in the process of selecting one or more public-key cryptographic algorithms through a public competition-like process. The new publickey cryptography standards will specify one or more additional digital signature, public-key encryption, and key-establishment algorithms to augment FIPS 186-4, Digital Signature Standard (DSS), as well as special publications SP 800-56A Revision 2, Recommendation for Pair-Wise Key Establishment Schemes Using Discrete Logarithm Cryptography, and SP 800-56B, Recommendation for Pair-Wise Key-Establishment Schemes Using Integer Factorization. It is intended that these algorithms will be capable of protecting sensitive information well into the foreseeable future, including after the advent of quantum computers. In November 2017, 82 candidate algorithms were submitted to NIST for consideration. Among these, 69 met both the minimum acceptance criteria and our submission requirements, and were accepted as First-Round Candidates on Dec. 20, 2017, marking the beginning of the First Round of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process. This report describes the evaluation criteria and selection process, based on public feedback and internal review of the first-round candidates, and summarizes the 26 candidate algorithms announced on January 30, 2019 for moving forward to the second round of the competition. The 17 Second-Round Candidate public-key encryption and key-establishment algorithms are BIKE, Classic McEliece, CRYSTALS-KYBER, FrodoKEM, HQC, LAC, LEDAcrypt (merger of LEDAkem/LEDApkc), NewHope, NTRU (merger of NTRUEncrypt/NTRU-HRSS-KEM), NTRU Prime, NTS-KEM, ROLLO (merger of LAKE/LOCKER/Ouroboros-R), Round5 (merger of Hila5/Round2), RQC, SABER, SIKE, and Three Bears. The 9 Second-Round Candidates for digital signatures are CRYSTALS-DILITHIUM, FALCON, GeMSS, LUOV, MQDSS, Picnic, qTESLA, Rainbow, and SPHINCS+.

Sublinear quantum algorithms for training linear and kernel-based classifiers - Tongyang Li; Shouvanik Chakrabarti; Xiaodi Wu (Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2019) PMLR, 2019)
We investigate quantum algorithms for classification, a fundamental problem in machine learning, with provable guarantees. Given n d-dimensional data points, the state-of-the-art (and optimal) classical algorithm for training classifiers with constant margin runs in O~(n+d) time. We design sublinear quantum algorithms for the same task running in O~(n−−√+d−−√) time, a quadratic improvement in both n and d. Moreover, our algorithms use the standard quantization of the classical input and generate the same classical output, suggesting minimal overheads when used as subroutines for end-to-end applications. We also demonstrate a tight lower bound (up to poly-log factors) and discuss the possibility of implementation on near-term quantum machines. As a side result, we also give sublinear quantum algorithms for approximating the equilibria of n-dimensional matrix zero-sum games with optimal complexity Θ~(n−−√).

Thermalization and chaos in QED3 - Julia Steinberg; Brian Swingle (Phys. Rev. D, 2019)
We study the real time dynamics of NF flavors of fermions coupled to a U(1) gauge field in 2+1 dimensions to leading order in a 1/NF expansion. For large enough NF, this is an interacting conformal field theory and describes the low energy properties of the Dirac spin liquid. We focus on thermalization and the onset of many-body quantum chaos which can be diagnosed from the growth of initally anti-commuting fermion field operators. We compute such anti-commutators in this gauge theory to leading order in 1/NF. We find that the anti-commutator grows exponentially in time and compute the quantum Lyapunov exponent. We briefly comment on chaos, locality, and gauge invariance.

Toward convergence of effective field theory simulations on digital quantum computers - Omar Shehab; Kevin A. Landsman; Yunseong Nam; Daiwei Zhu; Norbert M. Linke; Matthew J. Keesan; Raphael C. Pooser; Christopher R. Monroe (2019)
We report results for simulating an effective field theory to compute the binding energy of the deuteron nucleus using a hybrid algorithm on a trapped-ion quantum computer. Two increasingly complex unitary coupled-cluster ansaetze have been used to compute the binding energy to within a few percent for successively more complex Hamiltonians. By increasing the complexity of the Hamiltonian, allowing more terms in the effective field theory expansion and calculating their expectation values, we present a benchmark for quantum computers based on their ability to scalably calculate the effective field theory with increasing accuracy. Our result of E4=−2.220±0.179MeV may be compared with the exact Deuteron ground-state energy −2.224MeV. We also demonstrate an error mitigation technique using Richardson extrapolation on ion traps for the first time. The error mitigation circuit represents a record for deepest quantum circuit on a trapped-ion quantum computer.

Towards Bulk Metric Reconstruction from Extremal Area Variations - Ning Bao; ChunJun Cao; Sebastian Fischetti; Cynthia Keeler (2019)
The Ryu-Takayanagi and Hubeny-Rangamani-Takayanagi formulae suggest that bulk geometry emerges from the entanglement structure of the boundary theory. Using these formulae, we build on a result of Alexakis, Balehowsky, and Nachman to show that in four bulk dimensions, the entanglement entropies of boundary regions of disk topology uniquely fix the bulk metric in any region foliated by the corresponding HRT surfaces. More generally, for a bulk of any dimension , knowledge of the (variations of the) areas of two-dimensional boundary-anchored extremal surfaces of disk topology uniquely fixes the bulk metric wherever these surfaces reach. This result is covariant and not reliant on any symmetry assumptions; its applicability thus includes regions of strong dynamical gravity such as the early-time interior of black holes formed from collapse. While we only show uniqueness of the metric, the approach we present provides a clear path towards anexplicit spacetime metric reconstruction.

‘Two Dogmas’ Redux - Jeffrey Bub (Springer, Cham, 2019)
I revisit the paper ‘Two dogmas about quantum mechanics,’ co-authored with Itamar Pitowsky, in which we outlined an information-theoretic interpretation of quantum mechanics as an alternative to the Everett interpretation. Following the analysis by Frauchiger and Renner of ‘encapsulated’ measurements (where a super-observer, with unrestricted ability to measure any arbitrary observable of a complex quantum system, measures the memory of an observer system after that system measures the spin of a qubit), I show that the Everett interpretation leads to modal contradictions. In this sense, the Everett interpretation is inconsistent.

Two-qubit entangling gates within arbitrarily long chains of trapped ions - Kevin A. Landsman; Yukai Wu; Pak Hong Leung; Daiwei Zhu; Norbert M. Linke; Kenneth R. Brown; Luming Duan; Christopher R. Monroe (2019)
Ion trap systems are a leading platform for large scale quantum computers. Trapped ion qubit crystals are fully-connected and reconfigurable, owing to their long range Coulomb interaction that can be modulated with external optical forces. However, the spectral crowding of collective motional modes could pose a challenge to the control of such interactions for large numbers of qubits. Here, we show that high-fidelity quantum gate operations are still possible with very large trapped ion crystals, simplifying the scaling of ion trap quantum computers. To this end, we present analytical work that determines how parallel entangling gates produce a crosstalk error that falls off as the inverse cube of the distance between the pairs. We also show experimental work demonstrating entangling gates on a fully-connected chain of seventeen 171Yb+ ions with fidelities as high as 97(1)%.

Universal Constraints on Energy Flow and SYK Thermalization - Ahmed Almheiri; Alexey Milekhin; Brian Swingle (2019)

Validating and Certifying Stabilizer States - Amir Kalev; Anastasios Kyrillidis (Phys. Rev. A, 2019)
We propose a measurement scheme that validates the preparation of a target n-qubit stabilizer state. The scheme involves a measurement of n Pauli observables, a priori determined from the target stabilizer and which can be realized using single-qubit gates. Based on the proposed validation scheme, we derive an explicit expression for the worse-case fidelity, i.e., the minimum fidelity between the target stabilizer state and any other state consistent with the measured data. We also show that the worse-case fidelity can be certified, with high probability, using O(n) copies of the state of the system per measured observable.

Variational Quantum Computation of Excited States - Oscar Higgott; Daochen Wang; Stephen Brierley (Quantum, 2019)
The calculation of excited state energies of electronic structure Hamiltonians has many important applications, such as the calculation of optical spectra and reaction rates. While low-depth quantum algorithms, such as the variational quantum eigenvalue solver (VQE), have been used to determine ground state energies, methods for calculating excited states currently involve the implementation of high-depth controlled-unitaries or a large number of additional samples. Here we show how overlap estimation can be used to deflate eigenstates once they are found, enabling the calculation of excited state energies and their degeneracies. We propose an implementation that requires the same number of qubits as VQE and at most twice the circuit depth. Our method is robust to control errors, is compatible with error-mitigation strategies and can be implemented on near-term quantum compute

Verification Logics for Quantum Programs - Robert Rand (2019)
We survey the landscape of Hoare logics for quantum programs. We review three papers: "Reasoning about imperative quantum programs" by Chadha, Mateus and Sernadas; "A logic for formal verification of quantum programs" by Yoshihiko Kakutani; and "Floyd-hoare logic for quantum programs" by Mingsheng Ying. We compare the mathematical foundations of the logics, their underlying languages, and the expressivity of their assertions. We also use the languages to verify the Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm, and discuss their relative usability in practice.

Verified Optimization in a Quantum Intermediate Representation - Kesha Hietala; Robert Rand; Shih-Han Hung; Xiaodi Wu; Michael Hicks (2019)
We present sqire, a low-level language for quantum computing and verification. sqire uses a global register of quantum bits, allowing easy compilation to and from existing `quantum assembly' languages and simplifying the verification process. We demonstrate the power of sqire as an intermediate representation of quantum programs by verifying a number of useful optimizations, and we demonstrate sqire's use as a tool for general verification by proving several quantum programs correct.

α-Logarithmic negativity - Xin Wang; Mark M. Wilde (2019)
The logarithmic negativity of a bipartite quantum state is a widely employed entanglement measure in quantum information theory, due to the fact that it is easy to compute and serves as an upper bound on distillable entanglement. More recently, the κ-entanglement of a bipartite state was shown to be the first entanglement measure that is both easily computable and operationally meaningful, being equal to the exact entanglement cost of a bipartite quantum state when the free operations are those that completely preserve the positivity of the partial transpose. In this paper, we provide a non-trivial link between these two entanglement measures, by showing that they are the extremes of an ordered family of α-logarithmic negativity entanglement measures, each of which is identified by a parameter α∈[1,∞]. In this family, the original logarithmic negativity is recovered as the smallest with α=1, and the κ-entanglement is recovered as the largest with α=∞. We prove that the α-logarithmic negativity satisfies the following properties: entanglement monotone, normalization, faithfulness, and subadditivity. We also prove that it is neither convex nor monogamous. Finally, we define the α-logarithmic negativity of a quantum channel as a generalization of the notion for quantum states, and we show how to generalize many of the concepts to arbitrary resource theories.

Absence of Thermalization in Finite Isolated Interacting Floquet Systems - Karthik Seetharam; Paraj Titum; Michael Kolodrubetz; Gil Refael (Physical Review B, 2018)
Conventional wisdom suggests that the long time behavior of isolated interacting periodically driven (Floquet) systems is a featureless maximal entropy state characterized by an infinite temperature. Efforts to thwart this uninteresting fixed point include adding sufficient disorder to realize a Floquet many-body localized phase or working in a narrow region of drive frequencies to achieve glassy non-thermal behavior at long time. Here we show that in clean systems the Floquet eigenstates can exhibit non-thermal behavior due to finite system size. We consider a one-dimensional system of spinless fermions with nearest-neighbor interactions where the interaction term is driven. Interestingly, even with no static component of the interaction, the quasienergy spectrum contains gaps and a significant fraction of the Floquet eigenstates, at all quasienergies, have non-thermal average doublon densities. We show that this non-thermal behavior arises due to emergent integrability at large interaction strength and discuss how the integrability breaks down with power-law behavior in system size.

Asymmetric Particle Transport and Light-Cone Dynamics Induced by Anyonic Statistics - Fangli Liu; James R. Garrison; Dong-Ling Deng; Zhe-Xuan Gong; Alexey V. Gorshkov (Phys. Rev. Lett, 2018)
We study the non-equilibrium dynamics of Abelian anyons in a one-dimensional system. We find that the interplay of anyonic statistics and interactions gives rise to spatially asymmetric particle transport together with a novel dynamical symmetry that depends on the anyonic statistical angle and the sign of interactions. Moreover, we show that anyonic statistics induces asymmetric spreading of quantum information, characterized by asymmetric light cones of out-of-time-ordered correlators. Such asymmetric dynamics is in sharp contrast with the dynamics of conventional fermions or bosons, where both the transport and information dynamics are spatially symmetric. We further discuss experiments with cold atoms where the predicted phenomena can be observed using state-of-the-art technologies. Our results pave the way toward experimentally probing anyonic statistics through non-equilibrium dynamics.

Automated optimization of large quantum circuits with continuous parameters - Yunseong Nam; Neil J. Ross; Yuan Su; Andrew M. Childs; Dmitri Maslov (npj:Quantum Information, 2018)
We develop and implement automated methods for optimizing quantum circuits of the size and type expected in quantum computations that outperform classical computers. We show how to handle continuous gate parameters and report a collection of fast algorithms capable of optimizing large-scale quantum circuits. For the suite of benchmarks considered, we obtain substantial reductions in gate counts. In particular, we provide better optimization in significantly less time than previous approaches, while making minimal structural changes so as to preserve the basic layout of the underlying quantum algorithms. Our results help bridge the gap between the computations that can be run on existing hardware and those that are expected to outperform classical computers.

An autonomous single-piston engine with a quantum rotor - Alexandre Roulet; Stefan Nimmrichter; J. M. Taylor (2018)
Pistons are elementary components of a wide variety of thermal engines, converting input fuel into rotational motion. Here, we propose a single-piston engine where the rotational degree of freedom is effectively realized by the flux of a superconducting island -- a quantum rotor -- while the working volume corresponds to the effective length of a superconducting resonator. Our autonomous design implements a Carnot cycle, relies solely on standard thermal baths and can be implemented with circuit quantum electrodynamics. We demonstrate how the piston is able to extract a net positive work via its built-in synchronicity using a filter cavity as an effective valve, eliminating the need for external control.

A belief propagation algorithm based on domain decomposition - Brad Lackey (2018)
This note provides a detailed description and derivation of the domain decomposition algorithm that appears in previous works by the author. Given a large re-estimation problem, domain decomposition provides an iterative method for assembling Boltzmann distributions associated to small subproblems into an approximation of the Bayesian posterior of the whole problem. The algorithm is amenable to using Boltzmann sampling to approximate these Boltzmann distributions. In previous work, we have shown the capability of heuristic versions of this algorithm to solve LDPC decoding and circuit fault diagnosis problems too large to fit on quantum annealing hardware used for sampling. Here, we rigorously prove soundness of the method.

Bell monogamy relations in arbitrary qubit networks - Minh C. Tran; Ravishankar Ramanathan; Matthew McKague; Dagomir Kaszlikowski; Tomasz Paterek (2018)
Characterizing trade-offs between simultaneous violations of multiple Bell inequalities in a large network of qubits is computationally demanding. We propose a graph-theoretic approach to efficiently produce Bell monogamy relations in arbitrary arrangements of qubits. All the relations obtained for bipartite Bell inequalities are tight and leverage only a single Bell monogamy relation. This feature is unique to bipartite Bell inequalities, as we show that there is no finite set of such elementary monogamy relations for multipartite inequalities. Nevertheless, many tight monogamy relations for multipartite inequalities can be obtained with our method as shown in explicit examples.

Black Hole Microstate Cosmology - Sean Cooper; Moshe Rozali; Brian Swingle; Mark Van Raamsdonk; Christopher Waddell; David Wakeham (2018)
In this note, we explore the possibility that certain high-energy holographic CFT states correspond to black hole microstates with a geometrical behind-the-horizon region, modelled by a portion of a second asymptotic region terminating at an end-of-the-world (ETW) brane. We study the time-dependent physics of this behind-the-horizon region, whose ETW boundary geometry takes the form of a closed FRW spacetime. We show that in many cases, this behind-the-horizon physics can be probed directly by looking at the time dependence of entanglement entropy for sufficiently large spatial CFT subsystems. We study in particular states defined via Euclidean evolution from conformal boundary states and give specific predictions for the behavior of the entanglement entropy in this case. We perform analogous calculations for the SYK model and find qualitative agreement with our expectations. A fascinating possibility is that for certain states, we might have gravity localized to the ETW brane as in the Randall-Sundrum II scenario for cosmology. In this case, the effective description of physics beyond the horizon could be a big bang/big crunch cosmology of the same dimensionality as the CFT. In this case, the d-dimensional CFT describing the black hole microstate would give a precise, microscopic description of the d-dimensional cosmological physics.

Blind quantum computation using the central spin Hamiltonian - Minh C. Tran; J. M. Taylor (2018)
Blindness is a desirable feature in delegated computation. In the classical setting, blind computations protect the data or even the program run by a server. In the quantum regime, blind computing may also enable testing computational or other quantum properties of the server system. Here we propose a scheme for universal blind quantum computation using a quantum simulator capable of emulating Heisenberg-like Hamiltonians. Our scheme is inspired by the central spin Hamiltonian in which a single spin controls dynamics of a number of bath spins. We show how, by manipulating this spin, a client that only accesses the central spin can effectively perform blind computation on the bath spins. Remarkably, two-way quantum communication mediated by the central spin is sufficient to ensure security in the scheme. Finally, we provide explicit examples of how our universal blind quantum computation enables verification of the power of the server from classical to stabilizer to full BQP computation.

Bose Condensation of Photons Thermalized via Laser Cooling of Atoms - Chiao-Hsuan Wang; Michael Gullans; J. V. Porto; William D. Phillips; J. M. Taylor (2018)
A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is a quantum phase of matter achieved at low temperatures. Photons, one of the most prominent species of bosons, do not typically condense due to the lack of a particle number-conservation. We recently described a photon thermalization mechanism which gives rise to a grand canonical ensemble of light with effective photon number conservation between a subsystem and a particle reservoir. This mechanism occurs during Doppler laser cooling of atoms where the atoms serve as a temperature reservoir while the cooling laser photons serve as a particle reservoir. Here we address the question of the possibility of a BEC of photons in this laser cooling photon thermalization scenario and theoretically demonstrate that a Bose condensation of photons can be realized by cooling an ensemble of two-level atoms (realizable with alkaline earth atoms) inside a Fabry-Perot cavity.

BQP-completeness of Scattering in Scalar Quantum Field Theory - Stephen P. Jordan; Hari Krovi; Keith S. M. Lee; John Preskill (Quantum, 2018)
Recent work has shown that quantum computers can compute scattering probabilities in massive quantum field theories, with a run time that is polynomial in the number of particles, their energy, and the desired precision. Here we study a closely related quantum field-theoretical problem: estimating the vacuum-to-vacuum transition amplitude, in the presence of spacetime-dependent classical sources, for a massive scalar field theory in (1+1) dimensions. We show that this problem is BQP-hard; in other words, its solution enables one to solve any problem that is solvable in polynomial time by a quantum computer. Hence, the vacuum-to-vacuum amplitude cannot be accurately estimated by any efficient classical algorithm, even if the field theory is very weakly coupled, unless BQP=BPP. Furthermore, the corresponding decision problem can be solved by a quantum computer in a time scaling polynomially with the number of bits needed to specify the classical source fields, and this problem is therefore BQP-complete. Our construction can be regarded as an idealized architecture for a universal quantum computer in a laboratory system described by massive phi^4 theory coupled to classical spacetime-dependent sources.

Broadband optomechanical non-reciprocity - Alireza Seif; Mohammad Hafezi (Nature Photon, 2018)
Implementing non-reciprocal elements with a bandwidth comparable to optical frequencies is a challenge in integrated photonics. Now, a phonon pump has been used to achieve optical non-reciprocity over a large bandwidth.

Capacity Approaching Codes for Low Noise Interactive Quantum Communication - Debbie Leung; Ashwin Nayak; Ala Shayeghi; Dave Touchette; Penghui Yao; Nengkun Yu (Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing STOC 2018, 2018)
We consider the problem of implementing two-party interactive quantum communication over noisy channels, a necessary endeavor if we wish to fully reap quantum advantages for communication.     For an arbitrary protocol with n messages, designed for noiseless qudit channels, our main result is a simulation method that fails with probability less than $2^{-\Theta(n\epsilon)}$ and uses a qudit channel $n(1 + \Theta (\sqrt{\epsilon}))$ times, of which an $\epsilon$ fraction can be corrupted adversarially.   The simulation is thus capacity achieving to leading order, and we conjecture that it is optimal up to a constant factor in  the $\sqrt{\epsilon}$ term.     Furthermore, the simulation is in a model that does not require pre-shared resources such as randomness or entanglement between the communicating parties.   Surprisingly, this outperforms the best-known overhead of $1 + O(\sqrt{\epsilon \log \log 1/\epsilon})$ in the corresponding \emph{classical} model, which is also conjectured to be optimal      [Haeupler, FOCS'14].   Our work also improves over the best previously known quantum result where the overhead is a non-explicit large constant [Brassard \emph{et     al.}, FOCS'14] for low $\epsilon$.

Circuit QED-based measurement of vortex lattice order in a Josephson junction array - R. Cosmic; Hiroki Ikegami; Zhirong Lin; Kunihiro Inomata; J. M. Taylor; Yasunobu Nakamura (Phys. Rev. B 98, 060501, 2018)
Superconductivity provides a canonical example of a quantum phase of matter. When superconducting islands are connected by Josephson junctions in a lattice, the low temperature state of the system can map to the celebrated XY model and its associated universality classes. This has been used to experimentally implement realizations of Mott insulator and Berezinskii--Kosterlitz--Thouless (BKT) transitions to vortex dynamics analogous to those in type-II superconductors. When an external magnetic field is added, the effective spins of the XY model become frustrated, leading to the formation of topological defects (vortices). Here we observe the many-body dynamics of such an array, including frustration, via its coupling to a superconducting microwave cavity. We take the design of the transmon qubit, but replace the single junction between two antenna pads with the complete array. This allows us to probe the system at 10 mK with minimal self-heating by using weak coherent states at the single (microwave) photon level to probe the resonance frequency of the cavity. We observe signatures of ordered vortex lattice at rational flux fillings of the array.

Classical lower bounds from quantum upper bounds - Shalev Ben-David; Adam Bouland; Ankit Garg; Robin Kothari (2018)
We prove lower bounds on complexity measures, such as the approximate degree of a Boolean function and the approximate rank of a Boolean matrix, using quantum arguments. We prove these lower bounds using a quantum query algorithm for the combinatorial group testing problem. We show that for any function f, the approximate degree of computing the OR of n copies of f is Omega(sqrtn) times the approximate degree of f, which is optimal. No such general result was known prior to our work, and even the lower bound for the OR of ANDs function was only resolved in 2013. We then prove an analogous result in communication complexity, showing that the logarithm of the approximate rank (or more precisely, the approximate gamma_2 norm) of F: X x Y -> {0,1} grows by a factor of Omega~(sqrtn) when we take the OR of n copies of F, which is also essentially optimal. As a corollary, we give a new proof of Razborov's celebrated Omega(sqrtn) lower bound on the quantum communication complexity of the disjointness problem. Finally, we generalize both these results from composition with the OR function to composition with arbitrary symmetric functions, yielding nearly optimal lower bounds in this setting as well.

Coherent optical nano-tweezers for ultra-cold atoms - P. Bienias; S. Subhankar; Y. Wang; T-C Tsui; F. Jendrzejewski; T. Tiecke; G. Juzeliūnas; L. Jiang; S. L. Rolston; J. V. Porto; Alexey V. Gorshkov (2018)
There has been a recent surge of interest and progress in creating subwavelength free-space optical potentials for ultra-cold atoms. A key open question is whether geometric potentials, which are repulsive and ubiquitous in the creation of subwavelength free-space potentials, forbid the creation of narrow traps with long lifetimes. Here, we show that it is possible to create such traps. We propose two schemes for realizing subwavelength traps and demonstrate their superiority over existing proposals. We analyze the lifetime of atoms in such traps and show that long-lived bound states are possible. This work opens a new frontier for the subwavelength control and manipulation of ultracold matter, with applications in quantum chemistry and quantum simulation.

A Coherent Spin-Photon Interface in Silicon - X. Mi; M. Benito; S. Putz; D. M. Zajac; J. M. Taylor; Guido Burkard; J. R. Petta (Nature, 2018)
Electron spins in silicon quantum dots are attractive systems for quantum computing due to their long coherence times and the promise of rapid scaling using semiconductor fabrication techniques. While nearest neighbor exchange coupling of two spins has been demonstrated, the interaction of spins via microwave frequency photons could enable long distance spin-spin coupling and "all-to-all" qubit connectivity. Here we demonstrate strong-coupling between a single spin in silicon and a microwave frequency photon with spin-photon coupling rates g_s/(2π) > 10 MHz. The mechanism enabling coherent spin-photon interactions is based on spin-charge hybridization in the presence of a magnetic field gradient. In addition to spin-photon coupling, we demonstrate coherent control of a single spin in the device and quantum non-demolition spin state readout using cavity photons. These results open a direct path toward entangling single spins using microwave frequency photons.

A coherent spin–photon interface in silicon - X. Mi; M. Benito; S. Putz; D. M. Zajac; J. M. Taylor; Guido Burkard; J. R. Petta (Nature, 2018)
Electron spins in silicon quantum dots are attractive systems for quantum computing owing to their long coherence times and the promise of rapid scaling of the number of dots in a system using semiconductor fabrication techniques. Although nearest-neighbour exchange coupling of two spins has been demonstrated, the interaction of spins via microwave-frequency photons could enable long-distance spin–spin coupling and connections between arbitrary pairs of qubits (‘all-to-all’ connectivity) in a spin-based quantum processor. Realizing coherent spin–photon coupling is challenging because of the small magnetic-dipole moment of a single spin, which limits magnetic-dipole coupling rates to less than 1 kilohertz. Here we demonstrate strong coupling between a single spin in silicon and a single microwave-frequency photon, with spin–photon coupling rates of more than 10 megahertz. The mechanism that enables the coherent spin–photon interactions is based on spin–charge hybridization in the presence of a magnetic-field gradient. In addition to spin–photon coupling, we demonstrate coherent control and dispersive readout of a single spin. These results open up a direct path to entangling single spins using microwave-frequency photons.

Cryogenic Trapped-Ion System for Large Scale Quantum Simulation - G. Pagano; P. W. Hess; H. B. Kaplan; W. L. Tan; P. Richerme; P. Becker; A. Kyprianidis; J. Zhang; E. Birckelbaw; M. R. Hernandez; Y. Wu; C. Monroe (2018)
We present a cryogenic ion trapping system designed for large scale quantum simulation of spin models. Our apparatus is based on a segmented-blade ion trap enclosed in a 4 K cryostat, which enables us to routinely trap over 100 171Yb+ ions in a linear configuration for hours due to a low background gas pressure from differential cryo-pumping. We characterize the cryogenic vacuum by using trapped ion crystals as a pressure gauge, measuring both inelastic and elastic collision rates with the molecular background gas. We demonstrate nearly equidistant ion spacing for chains of up to 44 ions using anharmonic axial potentials. This reliable production and lifetime enhancement of large linear ion chains will enable quantum simulation of spin models that are intractable with classical computer modelling.

Dark state optical lattice with sub-wavelength spatial structure - Yang Wang; Sarthak Subhankar; Przemyslaw Bienias; Mateusz Lacki; Tsz-Chun Tsui; Mikhail A. Baranov; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Peter Zoller; James V. Porto; Steven L. Rolston (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2018)
We report on the experimental realization of a conservative optical lattice for cold atoms with a subwavelength spatial structure. The potential is based on the nonlinear optical response of three-level atoms in laser-dressed dark states, which is not constrained by the diffraction limit of the light generating the potential. The lattice consists of a one-dimensional array of ultranarrow barriers with widths less than 10 nm, well below the wavelength of the lattice light, physically realizing a Kronig-Penney potential. We study the band structure and dissipation of this lattice and find good agreement with theoretical predictions. Even on resonance, the observed lifetimes of atoms trapped in the lattice are as long as 44 ms, nearly <span class="mjx-chtml MathJax_CHTML" id="MathJax-Element-1-Frame" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block; line-height: 0; font-size: 14.84px; word-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; padding-top: 1px; padding-bottom: 1px; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Roboto, Arial, sans-serif;" tabindex="0">105times the excited state lifetime, and could be further improved with more laser intensity. The potential is readily generalizable to higher dimensions and different geometries, allowing, for example, nearly perfect box traps, narrow tunnel junctions for atomtronics applications, and dynamically generated lattices with subwavelength spacings.

Demonstration of Bayesian quantum game on an ion trap quantum computer - Neal Solmeyer; Norbert M. Linke; Caroline Figgatt; Kevin A. Landsman; Radhakrishnan Balu; George Siopsis; Christopher Monroe (2018)
We demonstrate a Bayesian quantum game on an ion trap quantum computer with five qubits. The players share an entangled pair of qubits and perform rotations on their qubit as the strategy choice. Two five-qubit circuits are sufficient to run all 16 possible strategy choice sets in a game with four possible strategies. The data are then parsed into player types randomly in order to combine them classically into a Bayesian framework. We exhaustively compute the possible strategies of the game so that the experimental data can be used to solve for the Nash equilibria of the game directly. Then we compare the payoff at the Nash equilibria and location of phase-change-like transitions obtained from the experimental data to the theory, and study how it changes as a function of the amount of entanglement.

Diffusion Monte Carlo Versus Adiabatic Computation for Local Hamiltonians - Jacob Bringewatt; William Dorland; Stephen P. Jordan; Alan Mink (Physical Review A, 2018)
Most research regarding quantum adiabatic optimization has focused on stoquastic Hamiltonians, whose ground states can be expressed with only real, nonnegative amplitudes. This raises the question of whether classical Monte Carlo algorithms can efficiently simulate quantum adiabatic optimization with stoquastic Hamiltonians. Recent results have given counterexamples in which path integral and diffusion Monte Carlo fail to do so. However, most adiabatic optimization algorithms, such as for solving MAX-k-SAT problems, use k-local Hamiltonians, whereas our previous counterexample for diffusion Monte Carlo involved n-body interactions. Here we present a new 6-local counterexample which demonstrates that even for these local Hamiltonians there are cases where diffusion Monte Carlo cannot efficiently simulate quantum adiabatic optimization. Furthermore, we perform empirical testing of diffusion Monte Carlo on a standard well-studied class of permutation-symmetric tunneling problems and similarly find large advantages for quantum optimization over diffusion Monte Carlo.

Dissipation induced dipole blockade and anti-blockade in driven Rydberg systems - Jeremy T. Young; Thomas Boulier; Eric Magnan; Elizabeth A. Goldschmidt; Ryan M. Wilson; Steven L. Rolston; James V. Porto; Alexey V. Gorshkov (Phys. Rev. A, 2018)
We study theoretically and experimentally the competing blockade and antiblockade effects induced by spontaneously generated contaminant Rydberg atoms in driven Rydberg systems. These contaminant atoms provide a source of strong dipole-dipole interactions and play a crucial role in the system's behavior. We study this problem theoretically using two different approaches. The first is a cumulant expansion approximation, in which we ignore third-order and higher connected correlations. Using this approach for the case of resonant drive, a many-body blockade radius picture arises, and we find qualitative agreement with previous experimental results. We further predict that as the atomic density is increased, the Rydberg population's dependence on Rabi frequency will transition from quadratic to linear dependence at lower Rabi frequencies. We study this behavior experimentally by observing this crossover at two different atomic densities. We confirm that the larger density system has a smaller crossover Rabi frequency than the smaller density system. The second theoretical approach is a set of phenomenological inhomogeneous rate equations. We compare the results of our rate-equation model to the experimental observations [E. A. Goldschmidt et al., <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.113001" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; color: rgb(50, 148, 216); line-height: inherit; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 113001 (2016)] and find that these rate equations provide quantitatively good scaling behavior of the steady-state Rydberg population for both resonant and off-resonant drives.

Distributed Quantum Metrology and the Entangling Power of Linear Networks - Wenchao Ge; Kurt Jacobs; Zachary Eldredge; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Michael Foss-Feig (Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 043604, 2018)
We derive a bound on the ability of a linear optical network to estimate a linear combination of independent phase shifts by using an arbitrary non-classical but unentangled input state, thereby elucidating the quantum resources required to obtain the Heisenberg limit with a multi-port interferometer. Our bound reveals that while linear networks can generate highly entangled states, they cannot effectively combine quantum resources that are well distributed across multiple modes for the purposes of metrology: in this sense linear networks endowed with well-distributed quantum resources behave classically. Conversely, our bound shows that linear networks can achieve the Heisenberg limit for distributed metrology when the input photons are hoarded in a small number of input modes, and we present an explicit scheme for doing so. Our results also have implications for measures of non-classicality.

Distributed Quantum Metrology and the Entangling Power of Linear Networks - Wenchao Ge; Kurt Jacobs; Zachary Eldredge; Alexey V. Gorshkov; Michael Foss-Feig (2018)
We derive a bound on the ability of a linear optical network to estimate a linear combination of independent phase shifts by using an arbitrary non-classical but unentangled input state, thereby elucidating the quantum resources required to obtain the Heisenberg limit with a multi-port interferometer. Our bound reveals that while linear networks can generate highly entangled states, they cannot effectively combine quantum resources that are well distributed across multiple modes for the purposes of metrology: in this sense linear networks endowed with well-distributed quantum resources behave classically. Conversely, our bound shows that linear networks can achieve the Heisenberg limit for distributed metrology when the input photons are hoarded in a small number of input modes, and we present an explicit scheme for doing so. Our results also have implications for measures of non-classicality.

Dynamic suppression of Rayleigh light scattering in dielectric resonators - Seunghwi Kim; J. M. Taylor; Gaurav Bahl (2018)
The ultimate limits of performance for any classical optical system are set by sub-wavelength fluctuations within the host material, that may be frozen-in or even dynamically induced. The most common manifestation of such sub-wavelength disorder is Rayleigh light scattering, which is observed in nearly all wave-guiding technologies today and can lead to both irreversible radiative losses as well as undesirable intermodal coupling. While it has been shown that backscattering from disorder can be suppressed by breaking time-reversal symmetry in magneto-optic and topological insulator materials, common optical dielectrics possess neither of these properties. Here we demonstrate an optomechanical approach for dynamically suppressing Rayleigh backscattering within dielectric resonators. We achieve this by locally breaking time-reversal symmetry in a silica resonator through a Brillouin scattering interaction that is available in all materials. Near-complete suppression of Rayleigh backscattering is experimentally confirmed through three independent measurements -- the reduction of the back-reflections caused by scatterers, the elimination of a commonly seen normal-mode splitting effect, and by measurement of the reduction in intrinsic optical loss. More broadly, our results provide new evidence that it is possible to dynamically suppress Rayleigh backscattering within any optical dielectric medium, for achieving robust light propagation in nanophotonic devices in spite of the presence of scatterers or defects.

Dynamical phase transitions in sampling complexity - Abhinav Deshpande; Bill Fefferman; Minh C. Tran; Michael Foss-Feig; Alexey V. Gorshkov (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2018)
We make the case for studying the complexity of approximately simulating (sampling) quantum systems for reasons beyond that of quantum computational supremacy, such as diagnosing phase transitions. We consider the sampling complexity as a function of time <span class="MathJax" id="MathJax-Element-153-Frame" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: inline; line-height: normal; font-size: 14px; word-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Open Sans", "Lucida Grande", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" tabindex="0"><nobr style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; border: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span class="math" id="MathJax-Span-1029" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline-block; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; width: 0.464em;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline-block; position: relative; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; width: 0.349em; height: 0px; font-size: 17.36px;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; position: absolute; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; clip: rect(1.558em, 1000.29em, 2.537em, -999.997em); top: -2.359em; left: 0em;"><span class="mrow" id="MathJax-Span-1030" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span class="mi" id="MathJax-Span-1031" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: MathJax_Math-italic;">t due to evolution generated by spatially local quadratic bosonic Hamiltonians. We obtain an upper bound on the scaling of <span class="MathJax" id="MathJax-Element-154-Frame" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: inline; line-height: normal; font-size: 14px; word-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Open Sans", "Lucida Grande", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" tabindex="0"><nobr style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; border: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span class="math" id="MathJax-Span-1032" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline-block; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; width: 0.464em;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline-block; position: relative; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; width: 0.349em; height: 0px; font-size: 17.36px;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; position: absolute; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; clip: rect(1.558em, 1000.29em, 2.537em, -999.997em); top: -2.359em; left: 0em;"><span class="mrow" id="MathJax-Span-1033" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span class="mi" id="MathJax-Span-1034" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: MathJax_Math-italic;">t with the number of bosons <span class="MathJax" id="MathJax-Element-155-Frame" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: inline; line-height: normal; font-size: 14px; word-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Open Sans", "Lucida Grande", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" tabindex="0"><nobr style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; border: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span class="math" id="MathJax-Span-1035" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline-block; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; width: 0.752em;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline-block; position: relative; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; width: 0.579em; height: 0px; font-size: 17.36px;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; position: absolute; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; clip: rect(1.731em, 1000.58em, 2.537em, -999.997em); top: -2.359em; left: 0em;"><span class="mrow" id="MathJax-Span-1036" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span class="mi" id="MathJax-Span-1037" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: MathJax_Math-italic;">n for which approximate sampling is classically efficient. We also obtain a lower bound on the scaling of <span class="MathJax" id="MathJax-Element-156-Frame" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: inline; line-height: normal; font-size: 14px; word-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Open Sans", "Lucida Grande", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" tabindex="0"><nobr style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; border: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span class="math" id="MathJax-Span-1038" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline-block; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; width: 0.464em;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline-block; position: relative; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; width: 0.349em; height: 0px; font-size: 17.36px;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; position: absolute; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; clip: rect(1.558em, 1000.29em, 2.537em, -999.997em); top: -2.359em; left: 0em;"><span class="mrow" id="MathJax-Span-1039" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span class="mi" id="MathJax-Span-1040" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: MathJax_Math-italic;">t with <span class="MathJax" id="MathJax-Element-157-Frame" style="box-sizing: inherit; display: inline; line-height: normal; font-size: 14px; word-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Open Sans", "Lucida Grande", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" tabindex="0"><nobr style="box-sizing: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; border: 0px; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span class="math" id="MathJax-Span-1041" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline-block; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; width: 0.752em;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline-block; position: relative; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; width: 0.579em; height: 0px; font-size: 17.36px;"><span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; position: absolute; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; clip: rect(1.731em, 1000.58em, 2.537em, -999.997em); top: -2.359em; left: 0em;"><span class="mrow" id="MathJax-Span-1042" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal;"><span class="mi" id="MathJax-Span-1043" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; transition: none 0s ease 0s; display: inline; position: static; vertical-align: 0px; line-height: normal; font-family: MathJax_Math-italic;">n for which any instance of the boson sampling problem reduces to this problem and hence implies that the problem is hard, assuming the conjectures of Aaronson and Arkhipov [Proc. 43rd Annu. ACM Symp. Theory Comput. STOC '11]. This establishes a dynamical phase transition in sampling complexity. Further, we show that systems in the Anderson-localized phase are always easy to sample from at arbitrarily long times. We view these results in the light of classifying phases of physical systems based on parameters in the Hamiltonian. In doing so, we combine ideas from mathematical physics and computational complexity to gain insight into the behavior of condensed matter, atomic, molecular and optical systems.

Electro-mechano-optical NMR detection - Kazuyuki Takeda; Kentaro Nagasaka; Atsushi Noguchi; Rekishu Yamazaki; Yasunobu Nakamura; Eiji Iwase; J. M. Taylor; Koji Usami (Optica, 2018)
Signal reception of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) usually relies on electrical amplification of the electromotive force caused by nuclear induction. Here, we report up-conversion of a radio-frequency NMR signal to an optical regime using a high-stress silicon nitride membrane that interfaces the electrical detection circuit and an optical cavity through the electro-mechanical and the opto-mechanical couplings. This enables optical NMR detection without sacrificing the versatility of the traditional nuclear induction approach. While the signal-to-noise ratio is currently limited by the Brownian motion of the membrane as well as additional technical noise, we find it can exceed that of the conventional electrical schemes by increasing the electro-mechanical coupling strength. The electro-mechano-optical NMR detection presented here can even be combined with the laser cooling technique applied to nuclear spins.