Quantum Physics

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 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.

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In the near future, where only a small number of companies and institutions will have access to large-scale quantum computers, it is essential that clients are able to delegate their computations in a secure way, without their data being accessible by the server. The field of blind quantum computation has emerged in recent years to address this issue, however, the majority of work on this topic has so far been restricted to the secure computation of sequences of quantum gates acting on a quantum state. Yet, a client capable of performing quantum subroutines may want to conceal not only their quantum states but also the subroutines they perform themselves. In this work, we introduce a framework of higher-order blind quantum computation, where a client performs a quantum subroutine (for example a unitary gate), which is transformed in a functional way by a server with more powerful quantum capabilities (described by a higher-order transformation), without the server learning about the details of the subroutine performed. As an example, we show how the DQC1 algorithm for estimating the trace of a unitary gate can be implemented securely by a server given only an (extended) black-box description of the unitary gate. Finally, we extend the framework to the case where the details of the server's algorithm are also concealed from the client.

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The essential requirement for fault-tolerant quantum computation (FTQC) is the total protocol design to achieve a fair balance of all the critical factors relevant to its practical realization, such as the space overhead, the threshold, and the modularity. A major obstacle in realizing FTQC with conventional protocols, such as those based on the surface code and the concatenated Steane code, has been the space overhead, i.e., the required number of physical qubits per logical qubit. Protocols based on high-rate quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes gather considerable attention as a way to reduce the space overhead, but problematically, the existing fault-tolerant protocols for such quantum LDPC codes sacrifice the other factors. Here we construct a new fault-tolerant protocol to meet these requirements simultaneously based on more recent progress on the techniques for concatenated codes rather than quantum LDPC codes, achieving a constant space overhead, a high threshold, and flexibility in modular architecture designs. In particular, under a physical error rate of 0.1%, our protocol reduces the space overhead to achieve the logical CNOT error rates 10^{−10} and 10^{−24} by more than 90% and 97%, respectively, compared to the protocol for the surface code. Furthermore, our protocol achieves the threshold of 2.4% under a conventional circuit-level error model, substantially outperforming that of the surface code. The use of concatenated codes also naturally introduces abstraction layers essential for the modularity of FTQC architectures. These results indicate that the code-concatenation approach opens a way to significantly save qubits in realizing FTQC while fulfilling the other essential requirements for the practical protocol design.

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What is a measurement? This, it turns out, is the most difficult question in physics today. In this talk, I will explain why the measurement problem is important and why all attempts to solve it so far have failed. I will then discuss the obvious solution to the problem that was, unfortunately, discarded half a century ago without ever being seriously considered: Superdeterminism. After addressing some common objections to this idea, I will summarize the existing approaches to develop a theory for it.

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In this talk, we will outline an efficient algorithm for port-based teleportation, a unitarily equivariant version of teleportation useful for constructing programmable quantum processors and performing instantaneous nonlocal computation (NLQC). The latter connection is important in AdS/CFT, where bulk computations are realized as boundary NLQC. Our algorithm yields an exponential improvement to the known relationship between the amount of entanglement available and the complexity of the nonlocal part of any unitary that can be implemented usin NLQC. Similarly, our algorithm provides the first nontrivial efficient algorithm for an approximate universal programmable quantum processor.

The key to our approach is a general quantum algorithm we develop for block diagonalizing so-called generalized induced representations, a novel type of representation that arises from lifting a representation of a subgroup to one for the whole group while relaxing a linear independence condition from the standard definition. Generalized induced representations appear naturally in quantum information, notably in generalizations of Schur-Weyl duality. For the case of port-based teleportation, we apply this framework to develop an efficient twisted Schur transform for transforming to a subgroup-reduced irrep basis of the partially transposed permutation algebra, whose dual is the U⊗n−k ⊗ (U∗) ⊗k representation of the unitary group.

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The asymptotic theory of quantum channel estimation has been well established, but in general noiseless and controllable ancilla is required for attaining the ultimate limit in the asymptotic regime. Little is known about the metrological performance without noiseless ancilla, which is more relevant in practical circumstances. In this work, we present a novel theoretical framework to address this problem, bridging quantum metrology and the asymptotic theory of quantum channels. Leveraging this framework, we prove sufficient conditions for achieving the Heisenberg limit with repeated application of the channel to estimate, both with and without applying interleaved unitary control operations. For the latter case, we design an algorithm to identify the control operation. Finally, we analyze several intriguing examples by our approach.

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