QUROPE Quantum Information Processing and Communication in Europe

Programmable linear optical interferometers are promising for classical and quantum applications. Their integrated design makes it possible to create more scalable and stable devices. To use them in practice, one has to reconstruct the whole device model taking the manufacturing errors into account. The inability to address individual interferometer elements complicates the reconstruction problem. A naive approach is to train the model via some complex optimization procedure. A faster optimization-free algorithm has been recently proposed [Opt. Express 31, 16729 (2023)]. However, it requires the full transfer matrix tomography while a more practical setup measures only the fields intensities at the interferometer output. In this paper, we propose the modification of the fast algorithm, which uses additional set of interferometer configurations in order to reconstruct the model in the case of intensity-only measurements. We show that it performs slightly worse than the original fast algorithm but it is more practical and still does not require intensive numerical optimization.

Emitters in high refractive index materials like 4H-SiC suffer from reduced detection of photons because of losses caused by total internal reflection. Thus, integration into efficient nanophotonic structures which couple the emission of photons to a well defined waveguide mode can significantly enhance the photon detection efficiency. In addition, interfacing this waveguide to a classical fiber network is of similar importance to detect the photons and perform experiments. Here, we show a waveguide fiber interface in SiC. By careful measurements we determine efficiencies exceeding 93 % for the transfer of photons from SiC nanobeams to fibers. We use this interface to create a bright single photon source based on waveguide integrated V2 defects in 4H-SiC and achieve an overall photon count rate of 181,000 counts/s, the highest value so far achieved for this system. We observe and quantify the strain induced shift of the ground state spin states and demonstrate coherent control of the electron spin with a coherence time of T2=42.5 $\rm\mu$s.

Multimode squeezed states of light have been proposed as a resource for achieving quantum advantage in computing and sensing. Recent experiments that demonstrate multimode Gaussian states to this end have most commonly opted for spatial or temporal modes, whereas a complete system based on frequency modes has yet to be realized. Instead, we show how to use the frequency modes simultaneously squeezed in a conventional, single-spatial-mode, optical parametric amplifier when pumped by ultrashort pulses. Specifically, we show how adiabatic frequency conversion can be used not only to convert the quantum state from infrared to visible wavelengths, but to concurrently manipulate the joint spectrum. This near unity-efficiency quantum frequency conversion, over a bandwidth >45 THz and, to our knowledge, the broadest to date, allows us to measure the state with an electron-multiplying CCD (EMCCD) camera-based spectrometer, at non-cryogenic temperatures. We demonstrate the squeezing of >400 frequency modes, with a mean of approximately 700 visible photons per shot. Our work shows how many-mode quantum states of light can be generated, manipulated, and measured with efficient use of hardware resources -- in our case, using one pulsed laser, two nonlinear crystals, and one camera. This ability to produce, with modest hardware resources, large multimode squeezed states with partial programmability motivates the use of frequency encoding for photonics-based quantum information processing.

We develop a field-nonlinear theory of sub-Doppler spectroscopy in a gas of two-level atoms, based on a self-consistent solution of the Maxwell-Bloch equations in the mean field and single-atom density matrix approximations. This makes it possible to correctly take into account the effects caused by the free motion of atoms in a gas, which lead to a nonlinear dependence of the spectroscopic signal on the atomic density even in the absent of a direct interatomic interaction (e.g., dipole-dipole interaction). Within the framework of this approach, analytical expressions for the light field were obtained for an arbitrary number of resonant waves and arbitrary optical thickness of a gas medium. Sub-Doppler spectroscopy in the transmission signal for two counterpropagating and co-propagating waves has been studied in detail. A previously unknown red shift of a narrow sub-Doppler resonance is predicted in a counterpropagating waves scheme, when the frequency of one wave is fixed and the frequency of the other wave is varied. The magnitude of this shift depends on the atomic density and can be more than an order of magnitude greater than the known shift from the interatomic dipole-dipole interaction (Lorentz-Lorenz shift). The found effects, caused by the free motion of atoms, require a significant revision of the existing picture of spectroscopic effects depending on the density of atoms in a gas. Apart of fundamental aspect, obtained results are important for precision laser spectroscopy and optical atomic clocks.

We rigorously prove that the spin-1/2 XYZ chain with a magnetic field has no local conserved quantity. Any nontrivial conserved quantity of this model is shown to be a sum of operators supported by contiguous sites with at least half of the entire system. We establish that the absence of local conserved quantity in concrete models is provable in a rigorous form.

The computation of the diameter is one of the most central problems in distributed computation. In the standard CONGEST model, in which two adjacent nodes can exchange $O(\log n)$ bits per round (here $n$ denotes the number of nodes of the network), it is known that exact computation of the diameter requires $\tilde \Omega(n)$ rounds, even in networks with constant diameter. In this paper we investigate quantum distributed algorithms for this problem in the quantum CONGEST model, where two adjacent nodes can exchange $O(\log n)$ quantum bits per round. Our main result is a $\tilde O(\sqrt{nD})$-round quantum distributed algorithm for exact diameter computation, where $D$ denotes the diameter. This shows a separation between the computational power of quantum and classical algorithms in the CONGEST model. We also show an unconditional lower bound $\tilde \Omega(\sqrt{n})$ on the round complexity of any quantum algorithm computing the diameter, and furthermore show a tight lower bound $\tilde \Omega(\sqrt{nD})$ for any distributed quantum algorithm in which each node can use only $\textrm{poly}(\log n)$ quantum bits of memory.

The advent of quantum technologies brought forward much attention to the theoretical characterization of the computational resources they provide. A method to quantify quantum resources is to use a class of functions called magic monotones and stabilizer entropies, which are, however, notoriously hard and impractical to evaluate for large system sizes. In recent studies, a fundamental connection between information scrambling, the magic monotone mana and 2-Renyi stabilizer entropy was established. This connection simplified magic monotone calculation, but this class of methods still suffers from exponential scaling with respect to the number of qubits. In this work, we establish a way to sample an out-of-time-order correlator that approximates magic monotones and 2-Renyi stabilizer entropy. We numerically show the relation of these sampled correlators to different non-stabilizerness measures for both qubit and qutrit systems and provide an analytical relation to 2-Renyi stabilizer entropy. Furthermore, we put forward and simulate a protocol to measure the monotonic behaviour of magic for the time evolution of local Hamiltonians.

Correlated quantum systems feature a wide range of nontrivial effects emerging from interactions between their constituting particles. In nonequilibrium scenarios, these manifest in phenomena such as many-body insulating states and anomalous scaling laws of currents of conserved quantities, crucial for applications in quantum circuit technologies. In this work we propose a giant rectification scheme based on the asymmetric interplay between strong particle interactions and a tilted potential, each of which induces an insulating state on their own. While for reverse bias both cooperate and induce a strengthened insulator with an exponentially suppressed current, for forward bias they compete generating conduction resonances; this leads to a rectification coefficient of many orders of magnitude. We uncover the mechanism underlying these resonances as enhanced coherences between energy eigenstates occurring at avoided crossings in the system's bulk energy spectrum. Furthermore, we demonstrate the complexity of the many-body nonequilibrium conducting state through the emergence of enhanced density matrix impurity and operator space entanglement entropy close to the resonances. Our proposal paves the way for implementing a perfect diode in currently-available electronic and quantum simulation platforms.

With the recent development of quantum information theory, some attempts exist to construct information theory beyond quantum theory. Here we consider hypothesis testing relative entropy and one-shot classical capacity, that is, the optimal rate of classical information transmitted by using a single channel under a constraint of a certain error probability, in general physical theories where states and measurements are operationally defined. Then we obtain the upper bound of one-shot classical capacity by generalizing the method given by Wang and Renner [Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 200501 (2012)]. Also, we derive the lower bound of the capacity by showing the existence of a good code that can transmit classical information with a certain error probability. Applying the above two bounds, we prove the asymptotic equivalence between classical capacity and hypothesis testing relative entropy even in any general physical theorem.

Quantum dynamics in a strongly disordered quantum many-body system show localization properties. The initial state memory is maintained owing to slow relaxation when the system is in the localized regime. This work demonstrates how localization can be observed using a noisy quantum computer by evaluating the magnetization and twist overlap in a quantum spin chain after short-time evolution. The quantities obtained from quantum-circuit simulation and real-device computation show their apparent dependence on disorder strength, although real-device computation suffers from noise-induced errors significantly. Using the exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian, we analyze how noise-induced errors affect those quantities. The analysis also suggests how the twist overlap can reflect the information on the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian.

In a two sided black hole, systems falling in from opposite asymptotic regions can meet inside the black hole and interact. This is the case even while the two CFTs describing each asymptotic region are non-interacting. Here, we relate these behind the horizon interactions to non-local quantum computations. This gives a quantum circuit perspective on these interactions, which applies whenever the interaction occurs in the past of a certain extremal surface that sits inside the black hole and in arbitrary dimension. Whenever our perspective applies, we obtain a boundary signature for these interior collisions which is stated in terms of the mutual information. We further revisit the connection discussed earlier between bulk interactions in one sided AdS geometries and non-local computation, and recycle some of our techniques to offer a new perspective on making that connection precise.

Quantum coherence will undoubtedly play a fundamental role in understanding the dynamics of quantum many-body systems, thereby to reveal its genuine contribution is of great importance. In this paper, we specialize our discussions on the one-dimensional transverse field quantum Ising model initialized in the coherent Gibbs state, and investigate the effects of quantum coherence on dynamical phase transition (DQPT). After quenching the strength of the transverse field, the effects of quantum coherence are studied by Fisher zeros, rate function and winding number. We find that quantum coherence not only recovers the traditional DQPT related to quantum phase transition, but also generates some entirely new DQPTs which are independent of equilibrium quantum critical point. In these entirely new QDPTs, the line of Fisher zeros cuts the imaginary axis twice, i.e., there are two critical modes, one makes the winding number jump down but another makes it jump up. We also find that the rate function can not be used to describe DQPT at high temperature, because the critical mode no longer dominates. This work sheds new light on the fundamental connection between quantum critical phenomena and quantum coherence.

Spatially-structured laser beams, eventually carrying orbital angular momentum, affect electronic transitions of atoms and their motional states in a complex way. We present a general framework, based on the spherical tensor decomposition of the interaction Hamiltonian, for computing atomic transition matrix elements for light fields of arbitrary spatial mode and polarization structures. We study both the bare electronic matrix elements, corresponding to transitions with no coupling to the atomic center-of-mass motion, as well as the matrix elements describing the coupling to the quantized atomic motion in the resolved side-band regime. We calculate the spatial dependence of electronic and motional matrix elements for tightly focused Hermite-Gaussian, Laguerre-Gaussian and for radially and azimuthally polarized beams. We show that near the diffraction limit, all these beams exhibit longitudinal fields and field gradients, which strongly affect the selection rules and could be used to tailor the light-matter interaction. The presented framework is useful for describing trapped atoms or ions in spatially-structured light fields and therefore for designing new protocols and setups in quantum optics, -sensing and -information processing.

We present an analysis of chaos and regularity in the open Dicke model, when dissipation is due to cavity losses. Due to the infinite Liouville space of this model, we also introduce a criterion to numerically find a complex spectrum which approximately represents the system spectrum. The isolated Dicke model has a well-defined classical limit with two degrees of freedom. We select two case studies where the classical isolated system shows regularity and where chaos appears. To characterize the open system as regular or chaotic, we study regions of the complex spectrum taking windows over the absolute value of its eigenvalues. Our results for this infinite-dimensional system agree with the Grobe-Haake-Sommers (GHS) conjecture for Markovian dissipative open quantum systems, finding the expected 2D Poisson distribution for regular regimes, and the distribution of the Ginibre unitary ensemble (GinUE) for the chaotic ones, respectively.

We investigate the effect that spatially modulated continuous conserved quantities can have on quantum ground states. We do so by introducing a family of one-dimensional local quantum rotor and bosonic models which conserve finite Fourier momenta of the particle number, but not the particle number itself. These correspond to generalizations of the standard Bose-Hubbard model (BHM), and relate to the physics of Bose surfaces. First, we show that while having an infinite-dimensional local Hilbert space, such systems feature a non-trivial Hilbert space fragmentation for momenta incommensurate with the lattice. This is linked to the nature of the conserved quantities having a dense spectrum and provides the first such example. We then characterize the zero-temperature phase diagram for both commensurate and incommensurate momenta. In both cases, analytical and numerical calculations predict a phase transition between a gapped (Mott insulating) and quasi-long range order phase; the latter is characterized by a two-species Luttinger liquid in the infrared, but dressed by oscillatory contributions when computing microscopic expectation values. Following a rigorous Villain formulation of the corresponding rotor model, we derive a dual description, from where we estimate the robustness of this phase using renormalization group arguments, where the driving perturbation has ultra-local correlations in space but power law correlations in time. We support this conclusion using an equivalent representation of the system as a two-dimensional vortex gas with modulated Coulomb interactions within a fixed symmetry sector. We conjecture that a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless-type transition is driven by the unbinding of vortices along the temporal direction.

Efficient methods for the simulation of quantum circuits on classic computers are crucial for their analysis due to the exponential growth of the problem size with the number of qubits. Here we study lumping methods based on bisimulation, an established class of techniques that has been proven successful for (classic) stochastic and deterministic systems such as Markov chains and ordinary differential equations. Forward constrained bisimulation yields a lower-dimensional model which exactly preserves quantum measurements projected on a linear subspace of interest. Backward constrained bisimulation gives a reduction that is valid on a subspace containing the circuit input, from which the circuit result can be fully recovered. We provide an algorithm to compute the constraint bisimulations yielding coarsest reductions in both cases, using a duality result relating the two notions. As applications, we provide theoretical bounds on the size of the reduced state space for well-known quantum algorithms for search, optimization, and factorization. Using a prototype implementation, we report significant reductions on a set of benchmarks. Furthermore, we show that constraint bisimulation complements state-of-the-art methods for the simulation of quantum circuits based on decision diagrams.

We present preliminary numerical evidence for the hypothesis that the Hamiltonian SU(2) gauge theory discretized on a lattice obeys the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH). To do so we study three approximations: (a) a linear plaquette chain in a reduced Hilbert space limiting the electric field basis to $j=0,\frac{1}{2}$ , (b) a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice with periodic or closed boundary condition and the same Hilbert space constraint, and (c) a chain of only three plaquettes but such a sufficiently large electric field Hilbert space ($j \leq \frac{7}{2})$ that convergence of all energy eigenvalues in the analyzed energy window is observed. While an unconstrained Hilbert space is required to reach the continuum limit of SU(2) gauge theory, numerical resource constraints do not permit us to realize this requirement for all values of the coupling constant and large lattices. In each of the three studied cases we check first for random matrix theory (RMT) behavior in the eigenenergy spectrum and then analyze the diagonal as well as the off-diagonal matrix elements between energy eigenstates for a few operators. Within current uncertainties all results for (a), (b) and (c) agree with ETH predictions. Furthermore, we find the off-diagonal matrix elements of the electric energy operator exhibit RMT behavior in frequency windows that are small enough in (b) and (c). To unambiguously establish ETH behavior and determine for which class of operators it applies, an extension of our investigations is necessary.

We discuss the nonlocal nature of quantum mechanics and the link with relativistic quantum mechanics such as formulated by quantum field theory. We use here a nonlocal quantum field theory (NLQFT) which is finite, satisfies Poincar\'e invariance, unitarity and microscopic causality. This nonlocal quantum field theory associates infinite derivative entire functions with propagators and vertices. We focus on proving causality and discussing its importance when constructing a relativistic field theory. We formulate scalar field theory using the functional integral in order to characterize quantum entanglement and the entanglement entropy of the theory. Using the replica trick, we compute the entanglement entropy for the theory in 3 + 1 dimensions on a cone. The result is free of UV divergences and we recover the area law.

Among the most fundamental questions in the manipulation of quantum resources such as entanglement is the possibility of reversibly transforming all resource states. The most important consequence of this would be the identification of a unique entropic resource measure that exactly quantifies the limits of achievable transformation rates. Remarkably, previous results claimed that such asymptotic reversibility holds true in very general settings; however, recently those findings have been found to be incomplete, casting doubt on the conjecture. Here we show that it is indeed possible to reversibly interconvert all states in general quantum resource theories, as long as one allows protocols that may only succeed probabilistically. Although such transformations have some chance of failure, we show that their success probability can be ensured to be bounded away from zero, even in the asymptotic limit of infinitely many manipulated copies. As in previously conjectured approaches, the achievability here is realised through operations that are asymptotically resource non-generating. Our methods are based on connecting the transformation rates under probabilistic protocols with strong converse rates for deterministic transformations. We strengthen this connection into an exact equivalence in the case of entanglement distillation.

The problem of Fleet Conversion aims to reduce the carbon emissions and cost of operating a fleet of vehicles for a given set of tours. It can be modelled as a column generation scheme with the Maximum Weighted Independent Set (MWIS) problem as the slave. Quantum variational algorithms have gained significant interest in the past several years. Recently, a method to represent Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problems using logarithmically fewer qubits was proposed. Here we use this method to solve the MWIS Slaves and demonstrate how quantum and classical solvers can be used together to approach an industrial-sized use-case (up to 64 tours).