Physics

Whether we aim to test the fundamental symmetries of the standard model, or to understand the structure and reactions of nuclei or the equation of state of dense nuclear matter, it may be helpful or necessary to understand these phenomena starting from the underlying quarks and gluons which make up all known matter in the universe.  After describing the complexities of this endeavor, I will highlight some recent progress and opportunities along this research direction.

It is commonly believed that logical states of quantum error-correcting codes have to be highly entangled such that codes capable of correcting more errors require more entanglement to encode a qubit. Here we show that this belief may or may not be true depending on a particular code. To this end, we characterize a tradeoff between the code distance d quantifying the number of correctable errors, and geometric entanglement of logical states quantifying their maximal overlap with product states or more general "topologically trivial" states. The maximum overlap is shown to be exponentially small in d for three families of codes: (1) low-density parity check (LDPC) codes with commuting check operators, (2) stabilizer codes, and (3) codes with a constant encoding rate. Equivalently, the geometric entanglement of any logical state of these codes grows at least linearly with d. On the opposite side, we also show that this distance-entanglement tradeoff does not hold in general. For any constant d and k (number of logical qubits), we show there exists a family of codes such that the geometric entanglement of some logical states approaches zero in the limit of large code length. This work was done by the collaboration with Sergey Bravyi, Zhi Li, and Beni Yoshida. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01332)