Quantum Physics

Entanglement in quantum many-body systems is typically fragile to interactions with the environment. Generic unital quantum channels, for example, have the maximally mixed state with no entanglement as their unique steady state. However, we find that for a unital quantum channel that is `strongly symmetric', i.e. it preserves a global on-site symmetry, the maximally mixed steady state in certain symmetry sectors can be highly entangled. For a given symmetry, we analyze the entanglement and correlations of the maximally mixed state in the invariant sector (MMIS), and show that the entanglement of formation and distillation are exactly computable and equal for any bipartition. For all Abelian symmetries, the MMIS is separable, and for all non-Abelian symmetries, the MMIS is entangled. Remarkably, for non-Abelian continuous symmetries described by compact semisimple Lie groups (e.g. SU(2)), the bipartite entanglement of formation for the MMIS scales logarithmically ∼logN with the number of qudits N.

While quantum correlations between two spacelike-separated systems are fully encoded by the bipartite density operator associated with the joint system, what operator encodes quantum correlations across space and time? I will describe the general theory of such "quantum states over time" as well as a canonical example that encodes the expectation values of certain observables measured sequentially in time. The latter extends the theory of pseudo-density matrices to arbitrary dimensions, not necessarily restricted to multi-qubit systems. In addition, quantum states over time admit a natural proposal for a general-purpose quantum Bayes' rule. Our results specialize to many well-studied examples, such as the state-update rule, the two-state vector formalism and weak values, and the Petz recovery map. This talk is based on joint work with James Fullwood and the two papers: arXiv: 2212.08088 [quant-ph] and 2405.17555 [quant-ph].