Talks

Particle physics underpins our understanding of the world at a fundamental level by describing the interplay of matter and forces through gauge theories. Yet, despite their unmatched success, the intrinsic quantum mechanical nature of gauge theories makes important problem classes notoriously difficult to address with classical computational techniques. A promising way to overcome these roadblocks is offered by quantum computers, which are based on the same laws that make the classical computations so difficult. Here, we present a quantum computation of the properties of the basic building block of two-dimensional lattice quantum electrodynamics, involving both gauge fields and matter. This computation is made possible by the use of a trapped-ion qudit quantum processor, where quantum information is encoded in d different states per ion, rather than in two states as in qubits. Qudits are ideally suited for describing gauge fields, which are naturally high-dimensional, leading to a dramatic reduction in the quantum register size and circuit complexity. Using a variational quantum eigensolver we find the ground state of the model and observe the interplay between virtual pair creation and quantized magnetic field effects. The qudit approach further allows us to seamlessly observe the effect of different gauge field truncations by controlling the qudit dimension. Our results open the door for hardware-efficient quantum simulations with qudits in near-term quantum devices.

"Null Polygons" in N=4 SYM theory describe the multi-point correlators of 1/2-BPS local operators with large R-charge, when they approach the vertices of a light-like polygon. The leading UV divergences of null polygons is conjectured to satisfy a hierarchy of coupled Toda field theory equations [E.O., Vieira ’22]. I will present some progress towards the prediction of Null Polygons beyond leading logarithms via the hexagons technique, appropriately truncated in the light-cone regime. The method, still conjectural, relies on a series of weak-coupling derivations performed in the Fishnet limit of the theory, where the hexagon representation is derived in the basis of eigenfunctions of a conformal Heisenberg magnet in the principal series. I will present a number of worked-out examples for multi-point multi-loop Fishnet Feynman integrals and Null Polygons.

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BosonSampling is one of the leading candidate models for a demonstration of quantum computational advantage. However, there are still important gaps between our best theoretical results and what can be implemented realistically in the laboratory. One of the largest gaps concerns the scaling between the number of modes (m) and number of photons (n) in the experiment. The original proposal by Aaronson and Arkhipov, as well as all subsequent improvements, required m to scale as n^2, whereas most state-of-the-art typically operate in a regime where m is linear in n. In this talk, I will describe how our recent work bridges this gap by providing evidence that BosonSampling remains hard even for m as low as 2n. I will review the template for proofs of computational advantage used in BosonSampling and other proposals, and discuss how we solved the new challenges that appear in this regime.

It is known that measurement-based quantum computations (MBQCs) which compute a non-linear Boolean function with sufficiently high probability of success are contextual, i.e., they cannot be described by a non-contextual hidden variable model. It is also known that contexuality has descriptions in terms of cohomology [1,2]. And so it seems in range to obtain a cohomological description of MBQC. And yet, the two connections mentioned above are not easily strung together. In a previous work [3], the cohomological description for MBQC was provided for the temporally flat case. Here we present the extension to the general temporally ordered case. [1] S. Abramsky, R. Barbosa, S. Mansfield, The Cohomology of Non-Locality and Contextuality, EPTCS 95, 2012, pp. 1-14 [2] C. Okay, S. Roberts, S.D. Bartlett, R. Raussendorf, Topological proofs of contextuality in quantum mechanics, Quant. Inf. Comp. 17, 1135-1166 (2017). [3] R. Raussendorf, Cohomological framework for contextual quantum computations, Quant. Inf. Comp. 19, 1141-1170 (2019) This is jount work with Polina Feldmann and Cihan Okay

Demonstrating quantum advantages in near term quantum devices is a notoriously difficult task. Ongoing efforts try to overcome different limitations of quantum devices without fault-tolerance, such as their limited system size or obstacles towards verification of the outcome of the computation. Proposals that exhibit more reliable quantum advantages for classically hard-to-simulate verifiable problems lack, at the same time, practical applicability. In this talk we will review different approaches to demonstrate quantum advantages inspired from many-body quantum physics. The first of them use entangled quantum resources such as cluster states, which are useful to demonstrate verifiable quantum advantages based on sampling problems (Theory proposal Phys. Rev. X 8, 021010, 2018 and recent experimental demonstration arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.14424). The second probe measurement of many-body quantities such as dynamical structure factors in quantum simulation setups (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (42), 26123-26134).

Nonlocal games are a foundational tool for understanding entanglement and constructing quantum protocols in settings with multiple spatially separated quantum devices. However, the spatial separation between devices can be difficult to enforce in practice. To this end, Kalai et al. (STOC '23) initiated the study of compiled nonlocal games. The KLVY compilation procedure transforms any k-prover nonlocal into a game with a classical verifier and a single cryptographically limited quantum prover. Kalai et al. showed that their compilation procedure is sound against classical provers and complete for entangled provers. Natarajan and Zhang (FOCS '23) showed that the compiled two-prover CHSH game is sound against quantum provers. I will discuss recent work, showing that the compiler is sound for any two-player XOR game. I will also discuss challenges and open questions in extending results from nonlocal games to the compiled setting.