QUROPE Quantum Information Processing and Communication in Europe

In [1], Collins et al. showed that the quantum entropy of random graph states satisfies the so-called area law as the local dimension tends to be large. In this paper, we continue to study the fluctuation of the convergence and thus prove the area law holds almost surely.

A full-fledged quantum network relies on the formation of entangled links between remote location with the help of quantum repeaters. The famous Duan-Lukin-Cirac-Zoller quantum repeater protocol is based on long distance single-photon interference, which not only requires high phase stability but also cannot generate maximally entangled state. Here, we propose a quantum repeater protocol using the idea of post-matching, which retains the same efficiency as the single-photon interference protocol, reduces the phase-stability requirement and can generate maximally entangled state in principle. Numerical simulations show that our protocol has its superiority by comparing with existing protocols under a generic noise model. Our work provides a promising solution to a long-distance quantum communication link. We believe this represents a crucial step towards the construction of a fully-connected quantum network.

The no-go theorem regarding unconditionally secure Quantum Bit Commitment protocols is a relevant result in quantum cryptography. Such result has been used to prove the impossibility of unconditional security for other protocols, such as Quantum Oblivious Transfer or One-Sided Two Party Computation. In this paper, we formally define two non-deterministic versions of Quantum Private Queries, a protocol addressing the Symmetric-Private Information Retrieval problem. We show that the strongest variant of such scheme is formally equivalent to Quantum Bit Commitment, Quantum Oblivious Transfer and One-Sided Two Party Computation protocols. This equivalence serves as conclusive evidence of the impracticality of achieving unconditionally secure Strong Probabilistic Quantum Private Queries.

Quantum control techniques represent one of the most efficient tools to attain high-fidelity quantum operations and a convenient approach for quantum sensing and quantum noise spectroscopy. In this work, we investigate dynamical decoupling while processing an entangling two-qubit gate based on an Ising-xx interaction, each qubit being affected by pure dephasing classical correlated 1/ f -noises. To evaluate the gate error, we used the Magnus expansion introducing generalized filter functions that describe decoupling while processing and allow us to derive an approximate analytic expression as a hierarchy of nested integrals of noise cumulants. The error is separated in contributions of Gaussian and non-Gaussian noise, the corresponding generalized filter functions being calculated up to the fourth order. By exploiting the properties of selected pulse sequences, we show that it is possible to extract the second-order statistics (spectrum and cross-spectrum) and to highlight non-Gaussian features contained in the fourth-order cumulant. We discuss the applicability of these results to state-of-the-art small networks based on solid-state platforms.

In this paper we establish almost-optimal stability estimates in quantum optimal transport pseudometrics for the semiclassical limit of the Hartree dynamics to the Vlasov-Poisson equation, in the regime where the solutions have bounded densities. We combine Golse and Paul's method from [Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 223:57-94, 2017], which uses a semiclassical version of the optimal transport distance and which was adapted to the case of the Coulomb and gravitational interactions by the second author in [J. Stat. Phys. 177:20-60, 2019], with a new approach developed by the first author in [Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 244:27-50, 2022] to quantitatively improve stability estimates in kinetic theory.

We explore the spatial features of various orders of Fraunhofer diffraction patterns in a four-level N-type atomic system. The system interacts with a weak probe light, a standing wave (SW) coupling field in the x-direction, and a cylindrical beam of composite optical vortex type. We derive the first-order linear and third-order cross-Kerr nonlinear parts of the probe susceptibility by expanding the probe susceptibility of the system into the second order of the SW beam. This allows us to solve the integral equation of Fraunhofer diffraction, decoding its varying degrees to specific degrees of Bessel functions containing the nonlinear susceptibility. Notably, the nonlinear susceptibility exhibits dependence on the Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) of the light beam, leading to spatial variations in the Bessel functions and, consequently, in the different orders of Fraunhofer diffraction. Leveraging the manipulation of OAM, we achieve precise control over the spatial mapping of diverse diffraction orders at various locations. Our research sheds new light on the spatial behavior of Fraunhofer diffraction in complex atomic systems. It presents exciting prospects for harnessing the OAM characteristics of light in future optical technologies.

The Mpemba effect is a counter-intuitive phenomena in which a hot system reaches a cold temperature faster than a colder system, under otherwise identical conditions. Here we propose a quantum analog of the Mpemba effect, on the simplest quantum system, a qubit. Specifically, we show it exhibits an inverse effect, in which a cold qubit reaches a hot temperature faster than a hot qubit. Furthermore, in our system a cold qubit can heat up exponentially faster, manifesting the strong version of the effect. This occurs only for sufficiently coherent systems, making this effect quantum mechanical, i.e. due to interference effects. We experimentally demonstrate our findings on a single $^{88}\text{Sr}^+$ trapped ion qubit.

The quantum wave nature of matter is a cornerstone of modern physics, which has been demonstrated for a wide range of fundamental and composite particles. While diffraction at nanomechanical masks is usually regarded to be independent of atomic or molecular internal states, the particles' polarisabilities and dipole moments lead to dispersive interactions with the grating surface. In prior experiments, such forces largely prevented matter-wave experiments with polar molecules, as they led to dephasing of the matter wave in the presence of randomly distributed charges incorporated into the grating. Here we show that ion-beam milling using neon facilitates the fabrication of lowly-charged nanomasks in gold-capped silicon nitride membranes. This allows us to observe the diffraction of polar molecules with a four times larger electric dipole moment than in previous experiments. This new capability opens a path to the assessment of the structure of polar molecules in matter-wave diffraction experiments.

Searching for exotic spin-dependent interactions that beyond the standard model has been of interest for past decades and is crucial for unraveling the mysteries of the universe. Previous laboratory searches primarily focus on searching for either static or modulated energy-level shifts caused by exotic spin-dependent interactions. Here, we introduce a theoretical model based on thermal motion of particles, providing another efficient way to search for exotic spin-dependent interactions. The theoretical model indicates that as the exotic spin-dependent interactions are related with the relative displacements and velocities of atoms, atoms undergoing thermal motion would experience a fluctuating energy-level shift induced by the exotic interactions. Moreover, the resulting exotic energy-level shift noise could be sensed by high-sensitivity instruments. By using the model and taking the high-sensitivity atomic magnetometer as an example, we set the most stringent laboratory experiment constraints on eight different kinds of exotic spin- and velocity-dependent interactions, with five of which at the force range below 1 cm have not been covered previously. Furthermore, this theoretical model can be easily applied in other fields of quantum sensing, such as atomic clocks, atom interferometers and NV-diamond sensors, to further improve the laboratory constraints on exotic spin-dependent interactions.

Grover's quantum search algorithm promises a quadratic speedup for unstructured search over its classical counterpart. But this advantage is gradually reduced with noise acting on the search space. In this article, we demonstrate that a quantum switch can act as a resource operation in mitigating the effect of the noise in the search space. In this scenario, fault-tolerant model quantum computing is costly. In addition to the noise modeled by a depolarizing channel, which coherently acts on the entire quantum register, such an error correction method can not be trivially implemented. We show that a quantum switch can significantly add value by reducing this error. In particular, we propose two frameworks for the application of switches. In the first framework, we apply the superposition of channels' orders in the form of a switch and do a post-selection at every iteration of the applications of the Grover operator. In the second framework, we delay the post-selection until the very end. In other words, if we want to look at the switch's action at the kth step, we already have k-1 post-selection measurements in place for the first framework. In the second case, we only have a single measurement. The number of post selections is minimal in the second scenario, so its effect is more credited to the switch. It also gives a significant advantage regarding the success probability of Grover's algorithm. We take the success probability as the sole quantifier of the switch's action in diminishing the effect of noise in search space.

The aim of the channel estimation is to estimate the parameters encoded in a quantum channel. For this aim, it is allowed to choose the input state as well as the measurement to get the outcome. Various precision bounds are known for the state estimation. For the channel estimation, the respective bounds are determined depending on the choice of the input state. However, determining the optimal input probe state and the corresponding precision bounds in estimation is a non-trivial problem, particularly in the multi-parameter setting, where parameters are often incompatible. In this paper, we present a conic programming framework that allows us to determine the optimal probe state for the corresponding multi-parameter precision bounds. The precision bounds we consider include the Holevo-Nagaoka bound and the tight precision bound that give the optimal performances of correlated and uncorrelated measurement strategies, respectively. Using our conic programming framework, we discuss the optimality of a maximally entangled probe state in various settings. We also apply our theory to analyze the canonical field sensing problem using entangled quantum probe states.

The nuclear-polarization corrections to the energy levels of highly charged ions are systematically investigated to leading order in the fine-structure constant. To this end, the notion of effective photon propagators with nuclear-polarization insertions is employed, where the nuclear excitation spectrum is calculated by means of the Hartree-Fock-based random-phase approximation. The effective Skyrme force is used to describe the interaction between nucleons, and the model dependence is analyzed. To leading order, the formalism predicts two contributions given by the effective vacuum-polarization and self-energy diagrams. The existing ambiguity around the vacuum-polarization term is resolved by demonstrating that it is effectively absorbed in the standard finite-nuclear-size correction. The self-energy part is evaluated with the full electromagnetic electron-nucleus interaction taken into account, where the importance of the effects of the nuclear three-currents is emphasized.

Driving a quantum many-body system across the quantum phase transition (QPT) in finite time has been concerned in different branches of physics to explore various fundamental questions. Here, we analyze how the underlying QPT affects the work distribution, when the controlling parameter of a ferromagnetic spinor Bose-Einstein condensates is tuned through the critical point in finite time.We show that the work distribution undergoes a dramatic change with increasing the driving time $\tau$, which is further captured by employing the entropy of the work distribution.We observe three distinct regions in the evolution of entropy as a function of $\tau$.Specifically, the entropy is insensitive to the driving time in the region of very short $\tau$. However, in the region with intermediate value of $\tau$, it exhibits a universal power-law decay consistent with the well-known Kibble-Zurek mechanism. For the region with large $\tau$, the validity of the adiabatic perturbation theory leads to the entropy decay as $\tau^{-2}\ln\tau$. Our results verify the usefulness of the entropy of the work distribution for understanding the critical dynamics and provide an alternative way to experimentally study nonequilibrium properties in quantum many-body systems.

Within a cavity quantum electrodynamics description, we characterize the fluorescent spectrum from ultracold bosons atoms, in the second harmonic generation (SHG) and resonant cases. Two situations are considered: i) bosons loaded into an optical lattice and ii) in a trapped two-component dilute Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), in the regime where the Bogoliubov approximation is often employed. Atom and photon degrees of freedom are treated on equal footing within an exact time-dependent configuration interaction scheme, and cavity leakage is included by including classical oscillator baths. For optical lattices, we consider few bosons in short chains, described via the Bose-Hubbard model with two levels per site, and we find that the spectral response grows on increasing the number of atoms at weak interactions, but diminishes at high interactions (if the number of chain sites does not exceed the number of atoms), and is shifted to lower frequency. In the BEC regime, the spectra display at noticeable extent a scaling behavior with the number of particles and a suitable rescaling of the BEC-cavity and inter-particle interactions, whilst the SHG spectrum redshifts at large atom-atom correlations. Overall, our results provide some general trends for the fluorescence from ultracold bosons in optical cavities, which can be of reference to experimental studies and further theoretical work.

The spatial Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM) is applied to the Kitaev chain with inhomogeneous pairing interactions that vanish in half of the lattice and result in a quantum critical point separating the superfluid and normal-gas phases in real space. The weakly-interacting BCS theory predicts scaling behavior of the penetration of the pair wavefunction into the normal-gas region different from conventional power-law results due to the non-analytic dependence of the BCS order parameter on the interaction. The Bogoliubov-de Gennes (BdG) equation produces numerical results confirming the scaling behavior and hints complications in the strong-interaction regime. The limiting case of the step-function quench shows the dominance of the BCS coherence length in absence of additional length scale. Furthermore, the energy spectrum and wavefunctions from the BdG equation show abundant in-gap states from the normal-gas region in addition to the topological edge states.

Larger multi-qubit quantum gates allow shallower, more efficient quantum circuits, which could decrease the prohibitive effect of noise on algorithms for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices and fault-tolerant error correction schemes. Such multi-qubit gates can potentially be generated by time-independent Hamiltonians comprising only physical (one- and two-local) interaction terms. Here, we present an algorithm that finds the strengths of the Hamiltonian terms by using the direction of the geodesic to the target quantum gate on the Riemannian manifold of $\mathrm{SU}(2^n)$ for $n$ qubits. Differential programming is used to determine how the Hamiltonian terms should be updated in order to follow the geodesic to the target unitary as closely as possible. We numerically compare our geodesic algorithm to gradient descent methods and show that it finds solutions with considerably fewer steps for standard multi-qubit gates such as Toffoli and Fredkin. The geodesic algorithm is then used to find previously unavailable multi-qubit gates implementing high fidelity parity checks, which could be used in a wide array of quantum codes and increase the clock speed of fault-tolerant quantum computers.

It has been shown that the spontaneous emission rate of photons by free electrons, unlike stimulated emission, is independent of the shape or modulation of the quantum electron wavefunction (QEW). Nevertheless, here we show that the quantum state of the emitted photons is non-classical and does depend on the QEW shape. This non-classicality originates from the shape dependent off-diagonal terms of the photon density matrix. This is manifested in the Wigner distribution function and would be observable experimentally through Homodyne detection techniques as a squeezing effect. Considering a scheme of electrons interaction with a single microcavity mode, we present a QED formulation of spontaneous emission by multiple modulated QEWs through a build-up process. Our findings indicate that in the case of a density modulated QEWs beam, the phase of the off-diagonal terms of the photon state emitted by the modulated QEWs is the harbinger of bunched beam superradiance, where the spontaneous emission is proportional to N_e^2. This observation offers a potential for enhancement of other quantum electron interactions with quantum systems by a modulated QEWs beam carrying coherence and quantum properties of the modulation.

A major difficulty in quantum simulation is the adequate treatment of a large collection of entangled particles, synonymous with electron correlation in electronic structure theory, with coupled cluster (CC) theory being the leading framework in dealing with this problem. Augmenting computationally affordable low-rank approximations in CC theory with a perturbative account of higher-rank excitations is a tractable and effective way of accounting for the missing electron correlation in those approximations. This is perhaps best exemplified by the "gold standard" CCSD(T) method, which bolsters the baseline CCSD with effects of triple excitations using considerations from many-body perturbation theory (MBPT). Despite this established success, such a synergy between MBPT and the unitary analog of CC theory (UCC) has not been explored. In this work, we propose a similar approach wherein converged UCCSD amplitudes, which can be obtained on a quantum computer, are leveraged by a classical computer to evaluate energy corrections associated with triple excitations - leading to the UCCSD[T] and UCCSD(T*) methods. The rationale behind these choices is shown to be rigorous by studying the properties of finite-order UCC energy functionals. Although our efforts do not support the addition of the fifth-order contribution as in the (T) correction, comparisons are nevertheless made using a hybrid UCCSD(T) approach. We assess the performance of these approaches on a collection of small molecules, and demonstrate the benefits of harnessing the inherent synergy between MBPT and UCC theories.

The entanglement entropy of a black hole, and that of its Hawking radiation, are expected to follow the so-called Page curve: After an increase in line with Hawking's calculation, it is expected to decrease back to zero once the black hole has fully evaporated, as demanded by unitarity. Recently, a simple system-plus-bath model has been proposed which shows a similar behaviour. Here, we make a general argument as to why such a Page-curve-like entanglement dynamics should be expected to hold generally for system-plus-bath models at small coupling and low temperatures, when the system is initialised in a pure state far from equilibrium. The interaction with the bath will then generate entanglement entropy, but it eventually has to decrease to the value prescribed by the corresponding mean-force Gibbs state. Under those conditions, it is close to the system ground state. We illustrate this on two paradigmatic open-quantum-system models, the exactly solvable harmonic quantum Brownian motion and the spin-boson model, which we study numerically. In the first example we find that the entanglement entropy peaks at intermediate times even if the impurity state stays close to the ground state during the whole evolution. In the second example, for an impurity initialised in the excited state, the Page time--when the entropy reaches its maximum--occurs when the excitation has half decayed.

Quantum states of angular momentum and spin generally are not invariant under rotations of the reference frame. Therefore, they can be used as a resource of relative orientation, which is encoded in the asymmetry of the state under consideration. In this paper we introduce the analytical characterization of the rotational information by parameterizing the group characteristic function by polynomial functions. By doing so, we show that the set of states achievable through $SU(2)$-covariant channels admits an analytical characterization and can be studied through the use of semidefinite optimization techniques. We demonstrate the developed methods via examples.