We present a protocol for transferring arbitrary continuous-variable quantum states into a few discrete-variable qubits and back. The protocol is deterministic and utilizes only two-mode Rabi-type interactions that are readily available in trapped-ion and superconducting circuit platforms. The inevitable errors caused by transferring an infinite-dimensional state into a finite-dimensional register are suppressed exponentially with the number of qubits. Furthermore, the encoded states exhibit robustness against noise, such as dephasing and amplitude damping, acting on the qubits. Our protocol thus provides a powerful and flexible tool for discrete-continuous hybrid quantum systems.

The recognition of entanglement states is a notoriously difficult problem when no prior information is available. Here, we propose an efficient quantum adversarial bipartite entanglement detection scheme to address this issue. Our proposal reformulates the bipartite entanglement detection as a two-player zero-sum game completed by parameterized quantum circuits, where a two-outcome measurement can be used to query a classical binary result about whether the input state is bipartite entangled or not. In principle, for an $N$-qubit quantum state, the runtime complexity of our proposal is $O(\mathrm{poly}(N)T)$ with $T$ being the number of iterations. We experimentally implement our protocol on a linear optical network and exhibit its effectiveness to accomplish the bipartite entanglement detection for 5-qubit quantum pure states and 2-qubit quantum mixed states. Our work paves the way for using near-term quantum machines to tackle entanglement detection on multipartite entangled quantum systems.

Protected qubits such as the $0\text{−}\pi$ qubit, and bosonic qubits including cat qubits and Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) qubits offer advantages for fault tolerance. Some of these protected qubits (e.g., $0\text{−}\pi$ qubit and Kerr-cat qubit) are stabilized by Hamiltonians which have (near-)degenerate ground state manifolds with large energy gaps to the excited state manifolds. Without dissipative stabilization mechanisms the performance of such energy-gap-protected qubits can be limited by leakage to excited states. Here, we propose a scheme for dissipatively stabilizing an energy-gap-protected qubit using colored (i.e., frequency-selective) dissipation without inducing errors in the ground state manifold. Concretely we apply our colored dissipation technique to Kerr-cat qubits and propose colored Kerr-cat qubits which are protected by an engineered colored single-photon loss. When applied to the Kerr-cat qubits our scheme significantly suppresses leakage-induced bit-flip errors (which we show are a limiting error mechanism) while only using linear interactions. Beyond the benefits to the Kerr-cat qubit we also show that our frequency-selective loss technique can be applied to a broader class of protected qubits.

Is a spontaneous perpetual reversal of the arrow of time possible? The out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) is a standard measure of irreversibility, quantum scrambling, and the arrow of time. The question may be thus formulated more precisely and conveniently: can spatially ordered perpetual OTOC oscillations exist in many-body systems? Here we give a rigorous lower bound on the amplitude of OTOC oscillations in terms of a strictly local dynamical algebra allowing for identification of systems that are out-of-time-ordered (OTO) crystals. While OTOC oscillations are possible for few-body systems, due to the spatial order requirement OTO crystals cannot be achieved by effective single or few body dynamics, e.g., a pendulum or a condensate. Rather they signal perpetual motion of quantum scrambling. It is likewise shown that if a Hamiltonian satisfies this novel algebra, it has an exponentially large number of local invariant subspaces, i.e., Hilbert space fragmentation. Crucially, the algebra, and hence the OTO crystal, are stable to local unitary and dissipative perturbations. A Creutz ladder is shown to be an OTO crystal, which thus perpetually reverses its arrow of time.

Photons, acting as “flying qubits” in propagation geometries such as waveguides, appear unavoidably in the form of wave packets (pulses). The actual shape of the photonic wave packet as well as possible temporal and spectral correlations between the photons play a critical role in successful scalable computation. Currently, unentangled indistinguishable photons are considered a suitable resource for scalable photonic circuits. Here we show that using so-called coherent photon conversion, it is possible to construct flying-qubit gates which are not only insensitive to wave shapes of the photons and temporal and spectral correlations between them but which also fully preserve these wave shapes and correlations upon the processing. This allows the use of photons with correlations and purity in a very broad range for a scalable computation. Moreover, such gates can process entangled photonic wave packets even more effectively than unentangled ones.

Recent work has shown the effectiveness of tensor network methods for computing large deviation functions in constrained stochastic models in the infinite time limit. Here we show that these methods can also be used to study the statistics of dynamical observables at arbitrary finite time. This is a harder problem because, in contrast to the infinite time case, where only the extremal eigenstate of a tilted Markov generator is relevant, for finite time the whole spectrum plays a role. We show that finite time dynamical partition sums can be computed efficiently and accurately in one dimension using matrix product states and describe how to use such results to generate rare event trajectories on demand. We apply our methods to the Fredrickson-Andersen and East kinetically constrained models and to the symmetric simple exclusion process, unveiling dynamical phase diagrams in terms of counting field and trajectory time. We also discuss extensions of this method to higher dimensions.

We develop an analytical approach for the description of quantum many-body scars in PXP models. We show that the scarred dynamics in the PXP model on a complete bipartite graph can be interpreted as a one-dimensional chiral scattering problem, and solve this problem analytically. The insights from this analysis allow us to predict that dynamical signatures of scars in PXP models can be enhanced by spin squeezing the initial states. We show numerically that this stabilization mechanism applies not only to the complete bipartite graph but also to one- and two-dimensional lattices, which are relevant for Rydberg atom array experiments. Moreover, our findings provide a physical motivation for Hamiltonian deformations reminiscent of those known to produce perfect scars.

We investigate dynamical fluctuations of transferred magnetization in the one-dimensional lattice Landau-Lifshitz magnet with uniaxial anisotropy, representing an emblematic model of interacting spins. We demonstrate that the structure of fluctuations in thermal equilibrium depends radically on the characteristic dynamical scale. In the ballistic regime, typical fluctuations are found to follow a normal distribution and scaled cumulants are finite. In stark contrast, on the diffusive and superdiffusive timescales, relevant, respectively, for the easy-axis and isotropic magnet at vanishing total magnetization, typical fluctuations are no longer Gaussian and, remarkably, scaled cumulants are divergent. The observed anomalous features disappear upon breaking integrability, suggesting that the absence of normal fluctuations is intimately tied to the presence of soliton modes. In a nonequilibrium setting of the isotropic magnet with weakly polarized step-profile initial state we find a slow drift of dynamical exponent from the superdiffusive towards the diffusive value.

Entanglement entropy (EE) contains signatures of many universal properties of conformal field theories (CFTs), especially in the presence of boundaries or defects. In particular, topological defects are interesting since they reflect internal symmetries of the CFT and have been extensively analyzed with field-theoretic techniques with striking predictions. So far, however, no lattice computation of EE has been available. Here, we present an ab initio analysis of EE for the Ising model in the presence of a topological defect. While the behavior of the EE depends, as expected, on the geometric arrangement of the subsystem with respect to the defect, we find that zero-energy modes give rise to crucial finite-size corrections. Importantly, contrary to the field-theory predictions, the universal subleading term in the EE when the defect lies at the edge of the subsystem arises entirely due to these zero-energy modes and is not directly related to the modular $S$ matrix of the Ising CFT.

The theory of open quantum systems lays the foundation for a substantial part of modern research in quantum science and engineering. Rooted in the dimensionality of their extended Hilbert spaces, the high computational complexity of simulating open quantum systems calls for the development of strategies to approximate their dynamics. In this Letter, we present an approach for tackling open quantum system dynamics. Using an exact probabilistic formulation of quantum physics based on positive operator-valued measure, we compactly represent quantum states with autoregressive neural networks; such networks bring significant algorithmic flexibility due to efficient exact sampling and tractable density. We further introduce the concept of string states to partially restore the symmetry of the autoregressive neural network and improve the description of local correlations. Efficient algorithms have been developed to simulate the dynamics of the Liouvillian superoperator using a forward-backward trapezoid method and find the steady state via a variational formulation. Our approach is benchmarked on prototypical one-dimensional and two-dimensional systems, finding results which closely track the exact solution and achieve higher accuracy than alternative approaches based on using Markov chain Monte Carlo method to sample restricted Boltzmann machines. Our Letter provides general methods for understanding quantum dynamics in various contexts, as well as techniques for solving high-dimensional probabilistic differential equations in classical setups.

We determine the phase diagram of the Abelian-Higgs model in one spatial dimension and time ($1+1\mathrm{D}$) on a lattice. We identify a line of first order phase transitions separating the Higgs region from the confined one. This line terminates in a quantum critical point above which the two regions are connected by a smooth crossover. We analyze the critical point and find compelling evidence for its description as the product of two noninteracting systems: a massless free fermion and a massless free boson. However, we find also some surprising results that cannot be explained by our simple picture, suggesting this newly discovered critical point is an unusual one.

The superiority of variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) such as quantum neural networks (QNNs) and variational quantum eigensolvers (VQEs) heavily depends on the expressivity of the employed Ansätze. Namely, a simple Ansatz is insufficient to capture the optimal solution, while an intricate Ansatz leads to the hardness of trainability. Despite its fundamental importance, an effective strategy of measuring the expressivity of VQAs remains largely unknown. Here, we exploit an advanced tool in statistical learning theory, i.e., covering number, to study the expressivity of VQAs. Particularly, we first exhibit how the expressivity of VQAs with an arbitrary Ansätze is upper bounded by the number of quantum gates and the measurement observable. We next explore the expressivity of VQAs on near-term quantum chips, where the system noise is considered. We observe an exponential decay of the expressivity with increasing circuit depth. We also utilize the achieved expressivity to analyze the generalization of QNNs and the accuracy of VQE. We numerically verify our theory employing VQAs with different levels of expressivity. Our Letter opens the avenue for quantitative understanding of the expressivity of VQAs.

We introduce the concept of seeding of crystallization in time by studying the dynamics of an ensemble of coupled continuous time crystals. We demonstrate that a single subsystem in a broken-symmetry phase acting as a nucleation center may induce time-translation symmetry breaking across the entire ensemble. Seeding is observed for both coherent and dissipative coupling, as well as for a broad range of parameter regimes. In the spirit of mutual synchronization, we investigate the parameter regime where all subsystems are in the broken-symmetry phase. We observe that more broadly detuned time crystals require weaker coupling strength to be synchronized. This is in contrast to basic knowledge from classical as well as quantum synchronization theory. We show that this surprising observation is a direct consequence of the seeding effect.

With the advent of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, practical quantum computing has seemingly come into reach. However, to go beyond proof-of-principle calculations, the current processing architectures will need to scale up to larger quantum circuits which will require fast and scalable algorithms for quantum error correction. Here, we present a neural network based decoder that, for a family of stabilizer codes subject to depolarizing noise and syndrome measurement errors, is scalable to tens of thousands of qubits (in contrast to other recent machine learning inspired decoders) and exhibits faster decoding times than the state-of-the-art union find decoder for a wide range of error rates (down to 1%). The key innovation is to autodecode error syndromes on small scales by shifting a preprocessing window over the underlying code, akin to a convolutional neural network in pattern recognition approaches. We show that such a preprocessing step allows to effectively reduce the error rate by up to 2 orders of magnitude in practical applications and, by detecting correlation effects, shifts the actual error threshold up to fifteen percent higher than the threshold of conventional error correction algorithms such as union find or minimum weight perfect matching, even in the presence of measurement errors. An in situ implementation of such a machine learning-assisted quantum error correction will be a decisive step to push the entanglement frontier beyond the NISQ horizon.

How irreversibility arises in a universe with time-reversal symmetric laws is a central problem in physics. In this Letter, we discuss a radically different take on the emergence of irreversibility, adopting the recently proposed constructor theory framework. Irreversibility is expressed as the requirement that a task is possible, while its inverse is not. We prove the compatibility of such irreversibility with quantum theory’s time-reversal symmetric laws, using a dynamical model based on the universal quantum homogenizer. We also test the physical realizability of this model by means of an experimental demonstration with high-quality single-photon qubits.