Quantum Physics

Quantum theory has a temporal composition, which is expressed under many different operational frameworks. Here, points in time are imbued with a Hilbert space structure, and quantum states are passed between times through a series of experimental interventions. A multi-time quantum process, therefore, carries the same complex properties as a many-body quantum state. This invites the question: to what extent can temporal correlations be as interesting as spatial ones, and how can we access them? One particular avenue through which this structure manifests is in open quantum systems. System-environment dynamics can precipitate non-Markovian processes by which correlations persist between different times. Recently, the advent of high-fidelity quantum devices has made it possible to probe coherent quantum systems. In this talk, I will discuss my recent work in which we show how this serves as a novel test bed to capture many-time physics. We build frameworks to extract generic spatiotemporal properties of quantum stochastic processes, show how process complexity may be manipulated, and elevate user-control into the theory to make it self-consistent. Remarkably, many of these complex features are already present in naturally occurring noise, and hence the results have direct application to the development of fault-tolerant quantum devices. I will also briefly discuss some of my future research goals: the existence of exotic temporal phenomena and how emergent spatiotemporal features can be captured through renormalisation group approaches; the learnability of spacetime quantum correlations and avenues here to quantum advantage; and the taming of correlated noise in quantum devices through bespoke error suppression and error correction. 

Quantum neural networks have been widely studied in recent years, given their potential practical utility and recent results regarding their ability to efficiently express certain classical data. However, analytic results to date rely on assumptions and arguments from complexity theory. Due to this, there is little intuition as to the source of the expressive power of quantum neural networks or for which classes of classical data any advantage can be reasonably expected to hold. In this talk, I will discuss my recent results (arXiv:2209.14353) studying the relative expressive power between a broad class of neural network sequence models and a class of recurrent models based on Gaussian operations with non-Gaussian measurements. We explicitly show that quantum contextuality is the source of an unconditional memory separation in the expressivity of the two model classes. Additionally, we use this intuition to study the relative performance of our introduced model on a standard translation data set exhibiting linguistic contextuality and show that the quantum model outperforms state-of-the-art classical models even in practice. I will also briefly discuss connections to my previous work studying the trainability of variational quantum algorithms (arXiv:2109.06957, arXiv:2205.05786).

Constraint satisfaction problems are known to always be "easy" or "hard", in the sense of being either solvable in P or being NP-complete, with no intermediate difficulty levels. The quantum analog of constraint problems, frustration-free Hamiltonians, are known to exhibit at least two more levels of complexity: QMA (for arbitrary local Hamiltonians) and MA (for stoquastic Hamiltonians). Wondering if other complexity classes can occur, we answer in the affirmative: there are interactions which can be freely arranged on qubits in any arrangement, such that the resulting frustration problem is BQP-complete, and captures exactly the difficulty of quantum computation. Simple modifications of this construction show that quantum constraint problems can be complete for QCMA and BPP as well. Based on https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.08381

Optical astronomical imaging looks for better imaging quality in extreme cases of weak and subdiffraction limits. I focus on the quantum enhancement of astronomical interferometric imaging, including its fundamental limit and practical issues. For the fundamental aspects, I ignore any resource limit and noise and consider the ideal imaging problems. I show that the resolution limit can be enhanced with more carefully chosen measurement strategies and the general imaging quality can be enhanced by postprocessing the stellar photons with a quantum computer. For the practical aspects, I try to overcome the transmission loss suffered by interferometric imaging using quantum network, consider the possibility to implement a local scheme with better performance, and discuss the feasibility of decomposing thermal states into temporally localized pulses.

Scrambling of quantum information is an important feature at the root of randomization and benchmarking protocols, the onset of quantum chaos, and black-hole physics.

Unscrambling this information is possible given perfect knowledge of the scrambler [ArXiv: 1710.03363].

We show that one can retrieve the scrambled information without any previous knowledge of the scrambler, by a learning algorithm that allows the building of an efficient decoder. Surprisingly, complex quantum scramblers admit Clifford decoders: the salient properties of a scrambling unitary can be efficiently described even if exponentially complex, as long as it is not fully chaotic. This is possible because all the redundant complexity can be described as an entropy, and for non-chaotic black holes can be efficiently pushed away, just like in a refrigerator. This entropy is not due to thermal fluctuations but to the non-stabilizer behavior of the scrambler.

The usual quantum mechanical description of measurements, unitary kicks, and other local operations has the potential to produce pathological causality violations in the relativistic setting of quantum field theory (QFT). While there are some operations that do not violate causality, those that do cannot be physically realisable. For local observables in QFT it is an open question whether the projection postulate, or more specifically the associated ideal measurement operation, is consistent with causality, and hence whether it is physically realisable in principle.

In this talk I will recap a criteria that distinguishes causal and acausal operations in real scalar QFT. I will then focus on operations constructed from smeared field operators - the basic local observables of the theory. For this simple class of operations we can write down a more practical causality criteria. With this we find that, under certain assumptions - such as there being a continuum spacetime - ideal measurements of smeared fields are acausal, despite prior heuristic arguments to the contrary. For a discrete spacetime (e.g. a causal set), however, one can evade this result in a ‘natural’ way, and thus uphold causality while retaining the projection postulate.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/94464896161?pwd=UkhPQnJONmlxYy9pQXJINThpY3l4QT09

We give a new definition of self-testing for correlations in terms of states on C*-algebras. We show that this definition is equivalent to the standard definition for any class of finite-dimensional quantum models which is closed under submodels and direct sums, provided that the correlation is extremal and has a full-rank model in the class. This last condition automatically holds for the class of POVM quantum models, but does not necessarily hold for the class of projective models by a result of Mancinska and Kaniewski. For extremal binary correlations and for extremal synchronous correlations, we show that any self-test for projective models is a self-test for POVM models. The question of whether there is a self-test for projective models which is not a self-test for POVM models remains open. An advantage of our new definition is that it extends naturally to commuting operator models. We show that an extremal correlation is a self-test for finite-dimensional quantum models if and only if it is a self-test for finite-dimensional commuting operator models, and also observe that many known finite-dimensional self-tests are in fact self-tests for infinite-dimensional commuting operator models.

Zoom link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/95783943431?pwd=SDFyQVVZR1d4WlVNSDZ4OENzSmJQUT09

We present broadly applicable nonperturbative results on the behavior of eigenvalues and eigenvectors under the addition of self-adjoint operators and under the multiplication of unitary operators, in finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. To this end, we decompose these operations into elementary 1-parameter processes in which the eigenvalues move similarly to the spheres in Newton's cradle. As special cases, we recover level repulsion and Cauchy interlacing. We discuss two examples of applications. Applied to adiabatic quantum computing, we obtain new tools to relate algorithmic complexity to computational slowdown through gap narrowing. Applied to information theory, we obtain a generalization of Shannon sampling theory, the theory that establishes the equivalence of continuous and discrete representations of information. The new generalization of Shannon sampling applies to signals of varying information density and finite length.

Zoom link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/94120657832?pwd=SmpsWFhhVCtyeXM3a0pVQU9lMGFLdz09

Generalized noncontextuality is a well-studied notion of classicality that is applicable to a single system, as opposed to Bell locality. It relies on representing operationally indistinguishable procedures identically in an ontological model. However, operational indistinguishability depends on the set of operations that one may use to distinguish two procedures: we refer to this set as the reference of indistinguishability. Thus, whether or not a given experiment is noncontextual depends on the choice of reference. The choices of references appearing in the literature are seldom discussed, but typically relate to a notion of system underlying the experiment. This shift in perspective then begs the question: how should one define the extent of the system underlying an experiment? Our paper primarily aims at exposing this question rather than providing a definitive answer to it. We start by formulating a notion of relative noncontextuality for prepare-and-measure scenarios, which is simply noncontextuality with respect to an explicit reference of indistinguishability. We investigate how verdicts of relative noncontextuality depend on this choice of reference, and in the process introduce the concept of the noncontextuality graph of a prepare-and-measure scenario. We then discuss several proposals that one may appeal to in order to fix the reference to a specific choice, and relate these proposals to different conceptions of what a system really is.

arXiv link:  https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.04469

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/97393198973?pwd=dWhCOUJQLytxeXVIVmEvOHRnRHc1QT09

We revisit the problem of how interactions emerge in quantum gravity. Namely, we show that bulk scattering of multiple particles in the AdS space requires multipartite entanglement on the boundary. This statement can be proven by two totally different methods, 1) general relativity and 2) quantum cryptographic argument. Furthermore, we argue that interactions among particles in the scattering event emerge from the mechanism of entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes (EAQECCs) which utilize pre-existing multipartite entanglement in CFT. We also propose a concrete protocol to implement a certain class of multi-partite unitary interactions by using transversal logical operators of quantum codes. This talk is based on a (very) recent work with Alex May and Jonathan Sorce.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/91349028320?pwd=TGF2Q2ZNdTZtZGxkQ0NiMURLdW5Zdz09

The phase diagram of a material is of central importance in describing the properties and behaviour of a condensed matter system. Indeed, the study of quantum phase transitions has formed a central part of 20th and 21st Century physics. We examine the complexity and computability of determining the phase diagram of a general Hamiltonian. We show that in the worst case it is uncomputable and in more restricted cases, where the Hamiltonian is “better behaved”, it remains computationally intractable even for a quantum computer. Finally, we take a look at the relations between the Renormalization Group and uncomputable Hamiltonians.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/96048987715?pwd=WGtwWk1SUnFsanNIVTZVYjNmbTh3Zz09

Joint work (in progress) with Ladina Hausmann, Nuriya Nurgalieva and Renato Renner

We can classify contemporary approaches to thermodynamics in roughly four camps:

(1) Top-down microscopic approaches. These are for example resource-theoretical approaches to quantum thermodynamics: they have a microscopic model of states and systems, and which microscopic restrictions implement macroscopic properties. For instance, in the resource theory of quantum thermodynamics, states are represented by density operators, thermal states in particular have a specific micro-canonical form, and constraints like energy preservation are enforced by forcing quantum transformations to commute with a global Hamiltonian. These approaches success at deriving thermodynamic laws in general settings that satisfy the microscopic model (like non-relativistic quantum systems.

(2) Bottom-up microscopic approaches. These also start from a microscopic model, but rather than looking for universal restrictions, they search for explicit thermodynamics protocols: this is the case of recent proposals for quantum work extraction or nano quantum heat engines.

(3) Top-down phenomenological approaches. These try to derive thermodynamic laws from first principles independently of a microscopic model. In principle the results derived in this framework can be applied to a wider variety of explicit systems, and the challenge is then to find the right implementations.  The first derivations of thermodynamics were naturally phenomenological, and some modern information-inspired derivations follow this approach.

(4) Bottom-up phenomenological approaches. These approaches try to find explicit thermodynamic protocols independently of the microscopic model, based only on operational properties of the systems at hand. It was the case for Carnot's original engines and more recently for some approaches to deriving black hole thermodynamics, or thermodynamics of new materials; some experimental results also fit in this camp.

In this work we generalize top-down phenomenological approaches to the case of multiple conserved quantities. Note that multiple conserved quantities have been studied in top-down and bottom-up microscopic approaches to quantum thermodynamics. We argue that our framework is more general, in that it can be applied to systems for which we don't have an explicit microscopic model; in particular we will apply the results of this framework to black hole thermodynamics. Moreover, having a phenomenological axiomatic approach to thermodynamics allows us to identify which properties are specific to a microscopic model like quantum physics, and which hold in any physical theory: our results can be applied to study the thermodynamics of generalized process theories, and other generalizations and foils of quantum mechanics. This generalization makes us reconsider the second law of thermodynamics, adapting for an exchange of different conserved quantities, for example, energy and angular momentum, or energy and spin. Our guiding principle here is to use information as a universal token of exchange to convert between different quantities via Landauer's principle.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/96001094153?pwd=YTArTGpPdEJ1NFBMcnFqV1dIRTVyZz09