QUROPE Quantum Information Processing and Communication in Europe

Conformal dynamics can appear in quantum gases when the interactions are fine tuned to be scale symmetric. One well-known example of such a system is a three-dimensional Fermi gas at a Feshbach resonance. In this letter, we illustrate how conformal dynamics can also emerge in the infrared limit in one-dimensional harmonically trapped Fermi gases, even though the system may not have exactly scale symmetric interactions. The conformal dynamics are induced by strong renormalization effects due to the nearby infrared stable scale invariant interaction. When the system approaches the infrared limit, or when the external harmonic trapping frequency $\omega_f \rightarrow 0$, the dynamics are characterized by a unique vanishingly small dissipation rate, $\Gamma \propto \omega_f$, rather than a constant as in generic interacting systems. We also examine the work done in a two-quench protocol, $W$, and the average power $\mathcal{P}$. In one dimension, the average power, $\mathcal{P} \propto \omega_f$, becomes vanishingly small in the infrared limit, a signature of emergent conformal dynamics.

Measurement-based quantum error correction relies on the ability to determine the state of a subset of qubits (ancillae) within a processor without revealing or disturbing the state of the remaining qubits. Among neutral-atom based platforms, a scalable, high-fidelity approach to mid-circuit measurement that retains the ancilla qubits in a state suitable for future operations has not yet been demonstrated. In this work, we perform imaging using a narrow-linewidth transition in an array of tweezer-confined $^{171}$Yb atoms to demonstrate nondestructive state-selective and site-selective detection. By applying site-specific light shifts, selected atoms within the array can be hidden from imaging light, which allows a subset of qubits to be measured while causing only percent-level errors on the remaining qubits. As a proof-of-principle demonstration of conditional operations based on the results of the mid-circuit measurements, and of our ability to reuse ancilla qubits, we perform conditional refilling of ancilla sites to correct for occasional atom loss, while maintaining the coherence of data qubits. Looking towards true continuous operation, we demonstrate loading of a magneto-optical trap with a minimal degree of qubit decoherence.

Stabilizer entropies (SEs) are measures of nonstabilizerness or `magic' that quantify the degree to which a state is described by stabilizers. SEs are especially interesting due to their connections to scrambling, localization and property testing. However, practical applications have been limited so far as previously known measurement protocols for SEs scale exponentially with the number of qubits. Here, we introduce the Tsallis-$n$ SE as an efficient measure of nonstabilizerness for quantum computers. We find that the number of measurements is independent of the number of qubits for any integer index $n>1$ which ensures the scalability of the measure. The Tsallis SE is an efficient bound of various nonstabilizerness monotones which are intractable to compute beyond a few qubits. Using the IonQ quantum computer, we experimentally measure the Tsallis SE of random Clifford circuits doped with non-Clifford gates and give bounds for the stabilizer fidelity, stabilizer extent and robustness of magic. As applications, we provide efficient algorithms to measure $4n$-point out-of-time-order correlators and multifractal flatness. Our results open up the exploration of nonstabilizerness with quantum computers.

The sustained intense experimental activity around atomic spectroscopy and the resulting high-precision measurements of atomic spectral lines attract interest in Lamb shift as a witness for noninertial effects in quantum systems. We investigate the Lamb shift in a two-level system undergoing uniform circular motion and coupled to a quantum electromagnetic field inside a cavity. We show that when the separation between different cavity modes is large compared to the width of each cavity mode, both the inertial and noninertial contributions to the Lamb shift are convergent. In addition, we find that the purely-noninertial Lamb shift maximizes away from the atomic resonance by an amount decided by the angular frequency of the circulating atom, lending itself to efficient enhancement by a suitable tuning of the cavity parameters. We argue that the noninertial contribution becomes detectable at accelerations $\sim 10^{14}~\mathrm{m/s^2}$.

We introduce a framework to compute upper bounds for temporal correlations achievable in open quantum system dynamics, obtained by repeated measurements on the system. As these correlations arise by virtue of the environment acting as a memory resource, such bounds are witnesses for the minimal dimension of an effective environment compatible with the observed statistics. These witnesses are derived from a hierarchy of semidefinite programs with guaranteed asymptotic convergence. We compute non-trivial bounds for various sequences involving a qubit system and a qubit environment, and compare the results to the best known quantum strategies producing the same outcome sequences. Our results provide a numerically tractable method to determine bounds on multi-time probability distributions in open quantum system dynamics and allow for the witnessing of effective environment dimensions through probing of the system alone.

Variational quantum eigensolvers (VQEs) are a highly successful technique for simulating physical models on quantum computers. Recently, they were extended to the measurement-based approach of quantum computing, bringing the strengths and advantages of this computational model to VQEs. In this work, we push the design and integration frontiers of VQE further by blending measurement-based elements into the gate-based paradigm to form a hybrid VQE. This facilitates the design of a problem-informed variational ansatz and also allows the efficient implementation of many-body Hamiltonians on NISQ devices. We experimentally demonstrate our approach on a superconducting quantum computer by investigating the perturbed planar code, Z2 and SU(3) lattice gauge theories, and the LiH molecule.

We develop a model for quantum computation which only relies on global driving, without the need of local addressing of the qubits. Our scheme is based on dual-species processors, and we present it in the framework on neutral atoms subjected to Rydberg blockade constraints. A circuit is imprinted in the (static) trap positions of the atoms, and the algorithm is executed by a sequence of global, resonant laser pulses; we show that this model for quantum computation is universal and scalable.

Coherent microwave-to-optical conversion is crucial for transferring quantum information generated in the microwave domain to optical frequencies, where propagation losses can be minimised. Among the various physical platforms that have realized coherent microwave-to-optical transduction, those that use atoms as transducers have shown rapid progress in recent years. In this paper we report an experimental demonstration of coherent microwave-to-optical conversion that maps a microwave signal to a large, tunable 550(30) MHz range of optical frequencies using room-temperature $^{87}$Rb atoms. The inhomogeneous Doppler broadening of the atomic vapor advantageously supports the tunability of an input microwave channel to any optical frequency channel within the Doppler width, along with simultaneous conversion of a multi-channel input microwave field to corresponding optical channels. In addition, we demonstrate phase-correlated amplitude control of select channels, resulting in complete extinction of one of the channels, providing an analog to a frequency domain beam splitter across five orders of magnitude in frequency. With frequency-division multiplexing capability, multi-channel conversion, and amplitude control of frequency channels, neutral atomic systems may be effective quantum processors for quantum information encoded in frequency-bin qubits.

Radiative tunneling recombination mechanism is observed in an InP nanowire solar cell at low temperatures. A link between observed radiative tunneling and field-emission dominated electrical transport is established through the characteristic tunneling energy. Plasmon-phonon interaction is found to play an important role in solar cell performance

Matrix Product States (MPS) have been proven to be a powerful tool to study quantum many-body systems but are restricted to moderately entangled states as the number of parameters scales exponentially with the entanglement entropy. While MPS can efficiently find ground states of 1D systems, their capacities are limited when simulating their dynamics, where the entanglement can increase ballistically with time. On the other hand, quantum devices appear as a natural platform to encode correlated many-body states, suited to perform time evolution. However, accessing the regime of modeling long-time dynamics is hampered by quantum noise. In this study we use the best of worlds: the short-time dynamics is efficiently performed by MPSs, compiled into short-depth quantum circuits followed by Trotter circuits run on a quantum computer. We quantify the capacities of this hybrid classical-quantum scheme in terms of fidelities and entanglement production taking into account a realistic noise model. We show that using classical knowledge in the form of MPSs provides a way to better use limited quantum resources and lowers the noise requirements to reach a practical quantum advantage. Combined with powerful noise-mitigation methods our approach allows us to simulate an 8-qubit system on an actual quantum device over a longer time scale than low bond dimension MPSs and purely quantum Trotter evolution.

A necessary condition for the probabilities of a set of events to exhibit Bell nonlocality or Kochen-Specker contextuality is that the graph of exclusivity of the events contains induced odd cycles with five or more vertices, called odd holes, or their complements, called odd antiholes. From this perspective, events whose graph of exclusivity are odd holes or antiholes are the building blocks of contextuality. For any odd hole or antihole, any assignment of probabilities allowed by quantum mechanics can be achieved in specific contextuality scenarios. However, here we prove that, for any odd hole, the probabilities that attain the quantum maxima cannot be achieved in Bell scenarios. We also prove it for the simplest odd antiholes. This leads us to the conjecture that the quantum maxima for any of the building blocks cannot be achieved in Bell scenarios. This result sheds light on why the problem of whether a probability assignment is quantum is decidable, while whether a probability assignment within a given Bell scenario is quantum is, in general, undecidable. This also helps to undertand why identifying principles for quantum correlations is simpler when we start by identifying principles for quantum sets of probabilities defined with no reference to specific scenarios.

We implement mid-circuit operations in a 48-site array of neutral atoms, enabled by new methods for control of the $\textit{omg}$ (optical-metastable-ground state qubit) architecture present in ${}^{171}$Yb. We demonstrate laser-based control of ground, metastable and optical qubits with average single-qubit fidelities of $F_{g} = 99.968(3)$, $F_{m} = 99.12(4)$ and $F_{o} = 99.804(8)$. With state-sensitive shelving between the ground and metastable states, we realize a non-destructive state-detection for $^{171}$Yb, and reinitialize in the ground state with either global control or local feed-forward operations. We use local addressing of the optical clock transition to perform mid-circuit operations, including measurement, spin reset, and motional reset in the form of ground-state cooling. In characterizing mid-circuit measurement on ground-state qubits, we observe raw errors of $1.8(6)\%$ on ancilla qubits and $4.5(1.0)\%$ on data qubits, with the former (latter) uncorrected for $1.0(2)\%$ ($2.0(2)\%$) preparation and measurement error; we observe similar performance for mid-circuit reset operations. The reported realization of the $\textit{omg}$ architecture and mid-circuit operations are door-opening for many tasks in quantum information science, including quantum error-correction, entanglement generation, and metrology.

The high-fidelity storage of quantum information is crucial for quantum computation and communication. Many experimental platforms for these applications exhibit highly biased noise, with good resilience to spin depolarisation undermined by high dephasing rates. In this work, we demonstrate that the memory performance of a noise-biased trapped-ion qubit memory can be greatly improved by incorporating error correction of dephasing errors through teleportation of the information between two repetition codes written on a pair of qubit registers in the same trap. While the technical requirements of error correction are often considerable, we show that our protocol can be achieved with a single global entangling phase gate of remarkably low fidelity, leveraging the fact that the gate errors are also dominated by dephasing-type processes. By rebalancing the logical spin-flip and dephasing error rates, we show that for realistic parameters our memory can exhibit error rates up to two orders of magnitude lower than the unprotected physical qubits, thus providing a useful means of improving memory performance in trapped ion systems where field-insensitive qubits are not available.

Quantum secret sharing (QSS) is a cryptographic protocol in which a quantum secret is distributed among a number of parties where some subsets of the parties are able to recover the secret while some subsets are unable to recover the secret. In the standard $((k,n))$ quantum threshold secret sharing scheme, any subset of $k$ or more parties out of the total $n$ parties can recover the secret while other subsets have no information about the secret. But recovery of the secret incurs a communication cost of at least $k$ qudits for every qudit in the secret. Recently, a class of communication efficient QSS schemes were proposed which can improve this communication cost to $\frac{d}{d-k+1}$ by contacting $d\geq k$ parties where $d$ is fixed prior to the distribution of shares. In this paper, we propose a more general class of $((k,n))$ quantum secret sharing schemes with low communication complexity. Our schemes are universal in the sense that the combiner can contact any number of parties to recover the secret with communication efficiency i.e. any $d$ in the range $k\leq d\leq n$ can be chosen by the combiner. This is the first such class of universal communication efficient quantum threshold schemes.

A $((k,n))$ quantum threshold secret sharing (QTS) scheme is a quantum cryptographic protocol for sharing a quantum secret among $n$ parties such that the secret can be recovered by any $k$ or more parties while $k-1$ or fewer parties have no information about the secret. Despite extensive research on these schemes, there has been very little study on optimizing the quantum communication cost during recovery. Recently, we initiated the study of communication efficient quantum threshold secret sharing (CE-QTS) schemes. These schemes reduce the communication complexity in QTS schemes by accessing $d\geq k$ parties for recovery; here $d$ is fixed ahead of encoding the secret. In contrast to the standard QTS schemes which require $k$ qudits for recovering each qudit in the secret, these schemes have a lower communication cost of $\frac{d}{d-k+1}$ for $d>k$. In this paper, we further develop the theory of communication efficient quantum threshold schemes. Here, we propose universal CE-QTS schemes which reduce the communication cost for all $d\geq k$ simultaneously. We provide a framework based on ramp quantum secret sharing to construct CE-QTS and universal CE-QTS schemes. We give another construction for universal CE-QTS schemes based on Staircase codes. We derived a lower bound on communication complexity and show that our constructions are optimal. Finally, an information theoretic model is developed to analyse CE-QTS schemes and the lower bound on communication complexity is proved again using this model.

We explore algebras associated with the hyperbolic band theory under a magnetic field for the first time. We define the magnetic Fuchsian group associated with a higher genus Riemann surface. By imposing the magnetic boundary conditions for the hyperbolic Bloch states, we construct the hyperbolic magnetic Bloch states and investigate their energy spectrum. We give a connection between such magnetic Bloch states and automorphic forms. Our theory is a general extension of the conventional algebra associated with the band theory defined on a Euclidean lattice/space into that of the band theory on a general hyperbolic lattice/Riemann surface.

The parametric maximum likelihood estimation problem is addressed in the context of quantum walk theory for quantum walks on the lattice of integers. A coin action is presented, with the real parameter $\theta$ to be estimated identified with the angular argument of an orthogonal reshuffling matrix. We provide analytic results for the probability distribution for a quantum walker to be displaced by $d$ units from its initial position after $k$ steps. For $k$ large, we show that the likelihood is sharply peaked at a displacement determined by the ratio $d/k$, which is correlated with the reshuffling parameter $\theta$. We suggest that this `reluctant walker' behaviour provides the framework for maximum likelihood estimation analysis, allowing for robust parameter estimation of $\theta$ via return probabilities of closed evolution loops and quantum measurements of the position of quantum walker with`reluctance index' $r=d/k$.

Current quantum simulators suffer from multiple limitations such as short coherence time, noisy operations, faulty readout and restricted qubit connectivity in some platforms. Variational quantum algorithms are the most promising approach in near-term quantum simulation to achieve practical quantum advantage over classical computers. Here, we explore variational quantum algorithms, with different levels of qubit connectivity, for digital simulation of the ground state of long-range interacting systems as well as generation of spin squeezed states. We find that as the interaction becomes more long-ranged, the variational algorithms become less efficient, achieving lower fidelity and demanding more optimization iterations. In particular, when the system is near its criticality the efficiency is even lower. Increasing the connectivity between distant qubits improves the results, even with less quantum and classical resources. Our results show that by mixing circuit layers with different levels of connectivity one can sensibly improve the performance. Interestingly, the order of layers becomes very important and grouping the layers with long-distance connectivity at the beginning of the circuit outperforms other permutations. The same design of circuits can also be used to variationally produce spin squeezed states, as a resource for quantum metrology.

Better versions of separability conditions for four mode optical fields, i.e. two beams with two modes of mutually orthogonal polarisation are given. Our conditions involve variances and their use is physically intuitive. Namely, if for a given quantum state the spread of the data around its mean value is smaller than the minimal spread predicted for the set of separable states, then the given state is entangled. Our conditions are formulated for standard quantum Stokes observables and normalized Stokes observables. We test them for bright squeezed vacuum with (and without) induced non-gaussianity obtained by addition or subtraction of photons. We propose a practical experimental scheme of how to generate such states and compare our entanglement conditions with other entanglement indicators.

Quantum communication has seen rapid progress towards practical large-scale networks, with quantum key distribution (QKD) spearheading this development. While fibre based systems have been shown to be well suited for metropolitan scales, suitable fibre infrastructure may not always be in place. Here, we make the case for an entanglement-based free-space quantum network as a practical and efficient alternative for metropolitan applications. We developed a deployable free space QKD system and demonstrated its use in realistic scenarios. For a representative 1.7-km free-space link, we showcase its ad hoc deployability and achieve secure key rates of up to 5.7 kbps, with 2.5 kbps in direct noon sunlight. By extrapolating experimental data, we show that kbps key rates are achievable even for 10-km distances and multi-user scenarios. We anticipate that our work will establish free space networks as a viable solution for metropolitan applications and an indispensable complementary building block in the future global quantum internet.