Physics

Creating Ensembles of Dual Unitary and Maximally Entangling Quantum Evolutions

Author(s): Suhail Ahmad Rather, S. Aravinda, and Arul Lakshminarayan

Maximally entangled bipartite unitary operators or gates find various applications from quantum information to many-body physics wherein they are building blocks of minimal models of quantum chaos. In the latter case, they are referred to as “dual unitaries.” Dual unitary operators that can create t...

[Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 070501] Published Mon Aug 10, 2020

Categories: Journals, Physics

Viewpoint: Sterile Neutrino Down but Not Completely Out

APS Physics - Mon, 2020-08-10 12:00

Author(s): Viviana Niro and Pedro Machado

Neutrino experiments place the most stringent limits to date on a hypothetical fourth neutrino, but the possibility that such a particle exists remains open.

[Physics 13, 123] Published Mon Aug 10, 2020

Categories: Physics

The Quantum Skin Hall Effect. (arXiv:2008.02284v1 [cond-mat.mes-hall])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

The skin effect, which is unique to non-Hermitian systems, can generate an extensive number of eigenstates localized near the boundary in an open geometry. Here we propose that in 2D and 3D other quantities besides charge density are susceptible to the skin effect. We show that 2D and 3D models that are a hybrid between topological insulators and skin-effect systems can have a topological skin effect where an extensive number of topological modes, and the corresponding bulk topological invariant, are pinned to the surface. A key example, which we call the quantum skin Hall effect is constructed from layers of Chern insulators and exhibits an extensive Hall conductance and number of chiral modes bound to surfaces normal to the stack of layers. The same procedure is further extended to other symmetry classes to illustrate that a variety of 1D and 2D topological invariants ($\mathbb{Z}$ or $\mathbb{Z}_2)$ are subject to the skin effect. Indeed, we also propose a hybrid 2D system that exhibits an extensive number of topological corner modes and may be more easily realized in meta-material experiments.

Categories: Journals, Physics

Topological and symmetry-enriched random quantum critical points. (arXiv:2008.02285v1 [cond-mat.str-el])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

We study how symmetry can enrich strong-randomness quantum critical points and phases, and lead to robust topological edge modes coexisting with critical bulk fluctuations. These are the disordered analogues of gapless topological phases. Using real-space and density matrix renormalization group approaches, we analyze the boundary and bulk critical behavior of such symmetry-enriched random quantum spin chains. We uncover a new class of symmetry-enriched infinite randomness fixed points: while local bulk properties are indistinguishable from conventional random singlet phases, nonlocal observables and boundary critical behavior are controlled by a different renormalization group fixed point.

Categories: Journals, Physics

Analog reheating of the early universe in the laboratory. (arXiv:2008.02290v1 [cond-mat.quant-gas])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

Cosmic reheating describes the transition of the post-inflationary universe to a hot and thermal state. In order to shed light on the nature of this process, we propose a quantum simulation of cosmic reheating in an ultracold Bose gas. In our model, the inflaton field dynamics is mapped onto that of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate whose excitations are identified with the particles produced by the decaying inflaton field. The expansion of the universe as well as the oscillations of the inflaton field are encoded in the time-dependence of the atomic interactions, which can be tuned experimentally via Feshbach resonances. As we illustrate by means of classical-statistical simulations for the case of two spatial dimensions, the dynamics of the atomic system exhibits the characteristic stages of far-from-equilibrium reheating, including the amplification of fluctuations via parametric instabilities and the subsequent turbulent transport of energy towards higher momenta. The transport is governed by a non-thermal fixed point showing universal self-similar time evolution as well as a transient regime of prescaling with time-dependent scaling exponents. While the classical-statistical simulations can only capture the earlier stages of the dynamics for weak couplings, the proposed experimental implementation provides a protocol for the quantum simulation of the entire evolution even beyond the weak coupling regime.

Categories: Journals, Physics

Probabilistic one-time programs using quantum entanglement. (arXiv:2008.02294v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

It is well known that quantum technology allows for an unprecedented level of data and software protection for quantum computers as well as for quantum-assisted classical computers. To exploit these properties, probabilistic one-time programs have been developed, where the encoding of classical software in small quantum states enables computer programs that can be used only once. Such self-destructing one-time programs facilitate a variety of new applications reaching from software distribution to one-time delegation of signature authority. Whereas first proof-of-principle experiments demonstrated the feasibility of such schemes, the practical applications were limited due to the requirement of using the software on-the-fly combined with technological challenges due to the need for active optical switching and a large amount of classical communication. Here we present an improved protocol for one-time programs that resolves major drawbacks of previous schemes, by employing entangled qubit pairs. This results in four orders of magnitude higher count rates as well the ability to execute a program long after the quantum information exchange has taken place. We demonstrate our protocol over an underground fiber link between university buildings in downtown Vienna. Finally, together with our implementation of a one-time delegation of signature authority this emphasizes the compatibility of our scheme with prepare-and-measure quantum internet networks.

Categories: Journals, Physics

A Sparse Model of Quantum Holography. (arXiv:2008.02303v1 [cond-mat.str-el])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

We study a sparse version of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model defined on random hypergraphs constructed either by a random pruning procedure or by randomly sampling regular hypergraphs. The resulting model has a new parameter, $k$, defined as the ratio of the number of terms in the Hamiltonian to the number of degrees of freedom, with the sparse limit corresponding to the thermodynamic limit at fixed $k$. We argue that this sparse SYK model recovers the interesting global physics of ordinary SYK even when $k$ is of order unity. In particular, at low temperature the model exhibits a gravitational sector which is maximally chaotic. Our argument proceeds by constructing a path integral for the sparse model which reproduces the conventional SYK path integral plus gapped fluctuations. The sparsity of the model permits larger scale numerical calculations than previously possible, the results of which are consistent with the path integral analysis. Additionally, we show that the sparsity of the model considerably reduces the cost of quantum simulation algorithms. This makes the sparse SYK model the most efficient currently known route to simulate a holographic model of quantum gravity. We also define and study a sparse supersymmetric SYK model, with similar conclusions to the non-supersymmetric case. Looking forward, we argue that the class of models considered here constitute an interesting and relatively unexplored sparse frontier in quantum many-body physics.

Categories: Journals, Physics

Hidden duality and accidental degeneracy in cycloacene and M\"obius cycloacene. (arXiv:2008.02304v1 [physics.chem-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

The accidental degeneracy appearing in cycloacenes as triplets and quadruplets is explained with the concept of segmentation, introduced here with the aim of describing the effective disconnection of $\pi$ orbitals on these organic compounds. For periodic systems with time reversal symmetry, the emergent nodal domains are shown to divide the atomic chains into simpler carbon structures analog to benzene rings, diallyl chains, anthracene (triacene) chains and tetramethyl-naphtalene skeletal forms. The common electronic levels of these segments are identified as members of degenerate multiplets of the global system. The peculiar degeneracy of M\"obius cycloacene is also explained by segmentation. In the last part, it is shown that the multiplicity of energies for cycloacene can be foreseen by studying the continuous limit of the tight-binding model; the degeneracy conditions are put in terms of Chebyshev polynomials. The results obtained in this work have important consequences on the physics of electronic transport in organic wires, together with their artificial realizations.

Categories: Journals, Physics

Magnon-driven dynamics of a hybrid system excited with ultrafast optical pulses. (arXiv:2008.02317v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

The potential of photon-magnon hybrid systems as building blocks for quantum information science has been widely demonstrated, and it is still the focus of much research. We leverage the strengths of this unique heterogeneous physical system in the field of precision physics beyond the standard model, where the sensitivity to the so-called "invisibles" is currently being boosted by quantum technologies. Here, we demonstrate that quanta of spin waves, driven by tiniest, effective magnetic field, can be detected in a large frequency band using a hybrid system as transducer. This result can be applied to the search of cosmological signals related, for example, to cold Dark Matter, which may directly interact with magnons. Our model of the transducer is based on a second-quantisation two-oscillators hybrid system, it matches the observations, and can be easily extended to thoroughly describe future large-scale ferromagnetic haloscopes.

Categories: Journals, Physics

Everettian relative states in the Heisenberg picture. (arXiv:2008.02328v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

Everett's relative-state construction in quantum theory has never been satisfactorily expressed in the Heisenberg picture. What one might have expected to be a straightforward process was impeded by conceptual and technical problems that we solve here. The result is a construction which, unlike Everett's own one in the Schr\"odinger picture, makes manifest the locality of Everettian multiplicity, and its inherently approximative nature, and its origin in certain kinds of entanglement and locally inaccessible information. Our construction also allows us to give a more precise definition of an Everett 'universe' (which is fully quantum, not quasi-classical), and we compare the Everettian decomposition of a quantum state with the foliation of a spacetime.

Categories: Journals, Physics

Piezoacoustics for flying electron qubits on helium. (arXiv:2008.02330v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

Piezoelectric surface acoustic waves (SAWs) are powerful for investigating and controlling elementary and collective excitations in condensed matter. In semiconductors SAWs have been used to reveal the underlying spatial and temporal structure of quantum phases of electronic matter, produce quantized charge pumping, transfer quantum information, and coherently control single electron states, culminating in the possibility of SAW-driven electronic flying qubits. However important challenges remain in protecting the coherence of propagating electrons from uncontrolled background nuclear spins, chemical dopants and spin-orbit crystal fields. In contrast, electrons trapped on the surface of superfluid helium form a ultra-clean low-dimensional electron system devoid of the imperfections limiting the coherence in semiconductors. However, SAWs have not, to-date, been employed to manipulate electrons in this system or to explore the development of flying-qubits. Additionally, electrons on helium form strongly-interacting Coulomb liquid and solid states having collective dynamics that can couple to SAWs. Here we report on the first coupling of electrons on helium to an evanescent piezoelectric SAW. The electrons surf with the piezoelectric wave and we demonstrate high-frequency charge pumping in this system for the first time. With this piezoacoustic method we can precisely transport as little as ~0.01% of the total electron density, opening the door to quantized charge pumping, the possibility of electrical metrology, and ultimately single electron state transfer with electrons on helium. We also show that SAWs are a route to directly investigating the high-frequency dynamical response, and relaxational processes, of collective excitations of the electronic liquid and solid phases of electrons on helium.

Categories: Journals, Physics

High-Fidelity Measurement of a Superconducting Qubit using an On-Chip Microwave Photon Counter. (arXiv:2008.02346v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

We describe an approach to the high-fidelity measurement of a superconducting qubit using an on-chip microwave photon counter. The protocol relies on the transient response of a dispersively coupled measurement resonator to map the state of the qubit to "bright" and "dark" cavity pointer states that are characterized by a large differential photon occupation. Following this mapping, we photodetect the resonator using the Josephson Photomultipler (JPM), which transitions between classically distinguishable flux states when cavity photon occupation exceeds a certain threshold. Our technique provides access to the binary outcome of projective quantum measurement at the millikelvin stage without the need for quantum-limited preamplification and thresholding at room temperature. We achieve raw single-shot measurement fidelity in excess of 98% across multiple samples using this approach in total measurement times under 500 ns. In addition, we show that the backaction and crosstalk associated with our measurement protocol can be mitigated by exploiting the intrinsic damping of the JPM itself.

Categories: Journals, Physics

Quantum Magic Rectangles: Characterisation and Application to Certified Randomness Expansion. (arXiv:2008.02370v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

We study a generalisation of the Mermin-Peres magic square game to arbitrary rectangular dimensions. After exhibiting some general properties, these rectangular games are characterised in terms of their optimal win probabilities for quantum strategies. We find that for $m\times n$ rectangular games of dimensions $m,n \geq 3$ there are quantum strategies that win with certainty, while for dimensions $1\times n$ quantum strategies do not outperform classical strategies. The final case of dimensions $2\times n$ is richer, and we give upper and lower bounds that both outperform the classical strategies. Finally, we apply our findings to quantum certified randomness expansion by using our previous results, obtaining the winning probability of games with a distinguished input for which the devices give a deterministic outcome, and following the analysis of Miller and Shi (2017).

Categories: Journals, Physics

SU(N)1 Chern-Simons theory, the Clifford group, and Entropy Cone. (arXiv:2008.02406v1 [hep-th])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

Entropy cones for SU(N)1 Chern-Simons theory are discussed. It is shown that stabilizer states can be constructed from topological operators in SU(N)1 for N odd prime, but not for SU(N)K; K >= 2. This implies that the topological entropy cone is properly contained in the stabilizer entropy cone for SU(N)K; K >= 2.

Categories: Journals, Physics

Electron shelving of a superconducting artificial atom. (arXiv:2008.02423v1 [cond-mat.mes-hall])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

Interfacing stationary qubits with propagating photons is a fundamental problem in quantum technology. Cavity quantum electrodynamics (CQED) invokes a mediator degree of freedom in the form of a far-detuned cavity mode, the adaptation of which to superconducting circuits (cQED) proved remarkably fruitful. The cavity both blocks the qubit emission and it enables a dispersive readout of the qubit state. Yet, a more direct (cavityless) interface is possible with atomic clocks, in which an orbital cycling transition can scatter photons depending on the state of a hyperfine or quadrupole qubit transition. Originally termed "electron shelving", such a conditional fluorescence phenomenon is the cornerstone of many quantum information platforms, including trapped ions, solid state defects, and semiconductor quantum dots. Here we apply the shelving idea to circuit atoms and demonstrate a conditional fluorescence readout of fluxonium qubit placed inside a matched one-dimensional waveguide. Cycling the non-computational transition between ground and third excited states produces a microwave photon every 91 ns conditioned on the qubit ground state, while the qubit coherence time exceeds 50 us. The readout has a built-in quantum non-demolition property, allowing over 100 fluorescence cycles in agreement with a four-level optical pumping model. Our result introduces a resource-efficient alternative to cQED. It also adds a state-of-the-art quantum memory to the growing toolbox of waveguide QED.

Categories: Journals, Physics

Photo ionization of an atom passed through a diffraction grating. (arXiv:2008.02453v1 [physics.atom-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

We consider photo ionization of an atom which, due to passing through a diffraction grating, is prepared in a multi-site state possessing a periodic space structure with alternating maxima and minima. It has been found that this process qualitatively differs from photo ionization of a 'normal' atom. In particular, the spectra of emitted electrons and recoil ions in this process display clear one- and two-particle interference effects. Moreover, there are also striking differences between the momentum distributions of these particles, which no longer mirror each other. The origin of all these features is discussed in detail. It is also shown that the information about the diffraction grating, which is encoded in the multi-site state of the atom, can be fully decoded by exploring the spectra of recoil ions whereas the photo-electron spectra contain this information only partially.

Categories: Journals, Physics

The hierarchy recurrences in local relaxation. (arXiv:2008.02458v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

Inside a closed many-body system undergoing the unitary evolution, a small partition of the whole system exhibits a local relaxation. If the total degrees of freedom of the whole system is a large but finite number, such a local relaxation would come across a recurrence after a certain time, namely, the dynamics of the local system suddenly appear random after a well-ordered oscillatory decay process. It is found in this paper, for a collection of $N$ two-level systems (TLSs), the local relaxation of one TLS within has a hierarchy structure hiding in the randomness after such a recurrence: similar recurrences appear in a periodical way, and the later recurrence brings in stronger randomness than the previous one. Both analytical and numerical results that we obtained well explains such hierarchy recurrences: the population of the local TLS (as an open system) diffuses out and regathers back periodically due the finite-size effect of the bath [the remaining $(N-1)$ TLSs]. We also find that the total correlation entropy, which sums up the entropy of all the $N$ TLSs, approximately exhibit a monotonic increase; in contrast, the entropy of each single TLS increases and decreases from time to time, and the entropy of the whole $N$-body system keeps constant during the unitary evolution.

Categories: Journals, Physics

Bounding the quantum capacity with flagged extensions. (arXiv:2008.02461v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

In this article we consider flagged extensions of channels that can be written as convex combination of other channels, and find general sufficient conditions for the degradability of the flagged extension. An immediate application is a bound on the quantum and private capacities of any channel being a mixture of a unitary operator and another channel, with the probability associated to the unitary operator being larger than $1/2$. We then specialize our sufficient conditions to flagged Pauli channels, obtaining a family of upper bounds on quantum and private capacities of Pauli channels. In particular, we establish new state-of-the-art upper bounds on the quantum and private capacities of the depolarizing channel, BB84 channel and generalized amplitude damping channel. Moreover, the flagged construction can be naturally applied to tensor powers of channels with less restricting degradability conditions, suggesting that better upper bounds could be found by considering a larger number of channel uses.

Categories: Journals, Physics

Analysis of nonclasscial features in a coupled macroscopic binary system. (arXiv:2008.02472v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

Nonclassical phenomena of quantum mechanics such as anticorrelation and photonic de Broglie waves (PBWs) have been recently understood as a special case of coherence optics with a particular phase relation between orthogonal bases composing a classical system. Such a macroscopic understanding of nonclassical features has also been confirmed experimentally for a coherence version of PBWs in a doubly-coupled Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI). Here, a multi-coupled MZI system is analyzed and discussed to obtain a general understanding of the nonclassical feature using tensor products of binary bases of a classical system. This analysis should intrigue a fundamental question of quantumness or nonclassicality limited to a microscopic world of a single photon or a single particle.

Categories: Journals, Physics

Scattering of Spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ Particles from a $\cal PT$-symmetric Complex Potential. (arXiv:2008.02506v1 [quant-ph])

arXiv.org: Quantum Physics - Sat, 2020-08-08 00:53

In this letter, we study the scattering of spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ particles from a spin-independent parity time ($\cal PT$)-symmetric complex potential, and for the first time, theoretically demonstrate the coexistence of $\cal PT$-symmetric and $\cal PT$-broken phases for broadband energy spectra in this system. We also show the existence of anisotropic transmission resonances, accessible through the tuning of energy. Our results are promising for applications in spintronics, semiconductor-based devices, and a better understanding of the topological surface states.

Categories: Journals, Physics