We analyze the ultimate quantum limit of resolving two identical sources in a noisy environment. We prove that in the presence of noise causing false excitation, such as thermal noise, the quantum Fisher information of arbitrary quantum states for the separation of the objects, which quantifies the resolution, always converges to zero as the separation goes to zero. Noisy cases contrast with noiseless cases where the quantum Fisher information has been shown to be nonzero for a small distance in various circumstances, revealing the superresolution. In addition, we show that false excitation on an arbitrary measurement, such as dark counts, also makes the classical Fisher information of the measurement approach to zero as the separation goes to zero. Finally, a practically relevant situation resolving two identical thermal sources is quantitatively investigated by using the quantum and classical Fisher information of finite spatial mode multiplexing, showing that the amount of noise poses a limit on the resolution in a noisy system.

The quantum multiparameter estimation is very different from the classical multiparameter estimation due to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics. When the optimal measurements for different parameters are incompatible, they cannot be jointly performed. We find a correspondence relationship between the inaccuracy of a measurement for estimating the unknown parameter with the measurement error in the context of measurement uncertainty relations. Taking this correspondence relationship as a bridge, we incorporate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle into quantum multiparameter estimation by giving a trade-off relation between the measurement inaccuracies for estimating different parameters. For pure quantum states, this trade-off relation is tight, so it can reveal the true quantum limits on individual estimation errors in such cases. We apply our approach to derive the trade-off between attainable errors of estimating the real and imaginary parts of a complex signal encoded in coherent states and obtain the joint measurements attaining the trade-off relation. We also show that our approach can be readily used to derive the trade-off between the errors of jointly estimating the phase shift and phase diffusion without explicitly parametrizing quantum measurements.

Symmetries are well known to have had a profound role in our understanding of nature and are a critical design concept for the realization of advanced technologies. In fact, many symmetry-broken states associated with different phases of matter appear in a variety of quantum technology applications. Such symmetries are normally broken in spatial dimension, however, they can also be broken temporally leading to the concept of discrete time symmetries and their associated crystals. Discrete time crystals (DTCs) are a novel state of matter emerging in periodically driven quantum systems. Typically, they have been investigated assuming individual control operations with uniform rotation errors across the entire system. In this work we explore a new paradigm arising from nonuniform rotation errors, where two dramatically different phases of matter coexist in well defined regions of space. We consider a quantum spin network possessing long-range interactions where different driving operations act on different regions of that network. What results from its inherent symmetries is a system where one region is a DTC, while the second is ferromagnetic. We envision our work to open a new avenue of research on chimeralike phases of matter where two different phases coexist in space.

In quantum systems, a subspace spanned by degenerate eigenvectors of the Hamiltonian may have higher symmetries than those of the Hamiltonian itself. When this enhanced-symmetry group can be generated from local operators, we call it a quasisymmetry group. When the group is a Lie group, an external field coupled to certain generators of the quasisymmetry group lifts the degeneracy, and results in exactly periodic dynamics within the degenerate subspace, namely, the many-body-scar dynamics (given that Hamiltonian is nonintegrable). We provide two related schemes for constructing one-dimensional spin models having on-demand quasisymmetry groups, with exact periodic evolution of a prechosen product or matrix-product state under external fields.

We verify that the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) holds universally for locally interacting quantum many-body systems. Introducing random matrix ensembles with interactions, we numerically obtain a distribution of maximum fluctuations of eigenstate expectation values for different realizations of interactions. This distribution, which cannot be obtained from the conventional random matrix theory involving nonlocal correlations, demonstrates that an overwhelming majority of pairs of local Hamiltonians and observables satisfy the ETH with exponentially small fluctuations. The ergodicity of our random matrix ensembles breaks down because of locality.

We study a quantum interacting spin system subject to an external drive and coupled to a thermal bath of vibrational modes, uncorrelated for different spins, serving as a model for dynamic nuclear polarization protocols. We show that even when the many-body eigenstates of the system are ergodic, a sufficiently strong coupling to the bath may effectively localize the spins due to many-body quantum Zeno effect. Our results provide an explanation of the breakdown of the thermal mixing regime experimentally observed above 4–5 K in these protocols.

Motivated by conjectures in holography relating the entanglement of purification and reflected entropy to the entanglement wedge cross section, we introduce two related non-negative measures of tripartite entanglement $g$ and $h$. We prove structure theorems which show that states with nonzero $g$ or $h$ have nontrivial tripartite entanglement. We then establish that in one dimension these tripartite entanglement measures are universal quantities that depend only on the emergent low-energy theory. For a gapped system, we argue that either $g\ne 0$ and $h=0$ or $g=h=0$, depending on whether the ground state has long-range order. For a critical system, we develop a numerical algorithm for computing $g$ and $h$ from a lattice model. We compute $g$ and $h$ for various CFTs and show that $h$ depends only on the central charge whereas $g$ depends on the whole operator content.

The nature of level set percolation in the two-dimensional Gaussian free field has been an elusive question. Using a loop-model mapping, we show that there is a nontrivial percolation transition and characterize the critical point. In particular, the correlation length diverges exponentially, and the critical clusters are “logarithmic fractals,” whose area scales with the linear size as $A\sim L^2/\sqrt{\ln L}$. The two-point connectivity also decays as the log of the distance. We corroborate our theory by numerical simulations. Possible conformal field theory interpretations are discussed.

The diverse range of resources which underlie the utility of quantum states in practical tasks motivates the development of universally applicable methods to measure and compare resources of different types. However, many of such approaches were hitherto limited to the finite-dimensional setting or were not connected with operational tasks. We overcome this by introducing a general method of quantifying resources for continuous-variable quantum systems based on the robustness measure, applicable to a plethora of physically relevant resources such as optical nonclassicality, entanglement, genuine non-Gaussianity, and coherence. We demonstrate in particular that the measure has a direct operational interpretation as the advantage enabled by a given state in a class of channel discrimination tasks. We show that the robustness constitutes a well-behaved, bona fide resource quantifier in any convex resource theory, contrary to a related negativity-based measure known as the standard robustness. Furthermore, we show the robustness to be directly observable—it can be computed as the expectation value of a single witness operator—and establish general methods for evaluating the measure. Explicitly applying our results to the relevant resources, we demonstrate the exact computability of the robustness for several classes of states.

A one-dimensional dissipative Hubbard model with two-body loss is shown to be exactly solvable. We obtain an exact eigenspectrum of a Liouvillian superoperator by employing a non-Hermitian extension of the Bethe-ansatz method. We find steady states, the Liouvillian gap, and an exceptional point that is accompanied by the divergence of the correlation length. A dissipative version of spin-charge separation induced by the quantum Zeno effect is also demonstrated. Our result presents a new class of exactly solvable Liouvillians of open quantum many-body systems, which can be tested with ultracold atoms subject to inelastic collisions.

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a widely applied but rather time-consuming tool in machine learning techniques. In 2014, Lloyd, Mohseni, and Rebentrost proposed a quantum PCA (qPCA) algorithm [Lloyd, Mohseni, and Rebentrost, Nat. Phys. 10, 631 (2014)] that still lacks experimental demonstration due to the experimental challenges in preparing multiple quantum state copies and implementing quantum phase estimations. Here, we propose a new qPCA algorithm using the hybrid classical-quantum control, where parameterized quantum circuits are optimized with simple measurement observables, which significantly reduces the experimental complexity. As one important PCA application, we implement a human face recognition process using the images from the Yale Face Dataset. By training our quantum processor, the eigenface information in the training dataset is encoded into the parameterized quantum circuit, and the quantum processor learns to recognize new face images from the test dataset with high fidelities. Our work paves a new avenue toward the study of qPCA applications in theory and experiment.

Optical many-body systems naturally possess strong light-matter interactions and are thus of central importance for photonic applications. However, these applications are so far limited within the regime of intrinsic dynamically stable phases, and the possibility of unstable phases remains unidentified. Here we experimentally revealed a new dynamical phase of intrinsic optical instability by using a continuous-wave laser to drive an erbium-doped crystal. The transmission through the sample became unstable for intense laser inputs, and transient net gain was observed if the light passed the sample twice. The phase transition, between states in and out of a dynamical equilibrium, was induced by the dipole-dipole interactions between nearby erbium ions.

We consider the fate of $1/N$ expansions in unstable many-body quantum systems, as realized by a quench across criticality, and show the emergence of $e^{2\lambda t}/N$ as a renormalized parameter ruling the quantum-classical transition and accounting nonperturbatively for the local divergence rate $\lambda$ of mean-field solutions. In terms of $e^{2\lambda t}/N$, quasiclassical expansions of paradigmatic examples of criticality, like the self-trapping transition in an integrable Bose-Hubbard dimer and the generic instability of attractive bosonic systems toward soliton formation, are pushed to arbitrarily high orders. The agreement with numerical simulations supports the general nature of our results in the appropriately combined long-time $\lambda t\to \infty$ quasiclassical $N\to \infty$ regime, out of reach of expansions in the bare parameter $1/N$. For scrambling in many-body hyperbolic systems, our results provide formal grounds to a conjectured multiexponential form of out-of-time-ordered correlators.

The tensor product postulate of quantum mechanics states that the Hilbert space of a composite system is the tensor product of the components’ Hilbert spaces. All current formalizations of quantum mechanics that do not contain this postulate contain some equivalent postulate or assumption (sometimes hidden). Here we give a natural definition of a composite system as a set containing the component systems and show how one can logically derive the tensor product rule from the state postulate and from the measurement postulate. In other words, our Letter reduces by one the number of postulates necessary to quantum mechanics.

Quantum computation promises intrinsically parallel information processing capacity by harnessing the superposition and entanglement of quantum states. However, it is still challenging to realize universal quantum computation due that the reliability and scalability are limited by unavoidable noises on qubits. Nontrivial topological properties like quantum Hall phases are found capable of offering protection, but require stringent conditions of topological band gaps and broken time-reversal symmetry. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a symmetry-induced error filtering scheme, showing a more general role of geometry in protection mechanism and applications. We encode qubits in a superposition of two spatial modes on a photonic Lieb lattice. The geometric symmetry endows the system with topological properties featuring a flat band touching, leading to distinctive transmission behaviors of $\pi$-phase qubits and 0-phase qubits. The geometry exhibits a significant effect on filtering phase errors, which also enables it to monitor phase deviations in real time. The symmetry-induced error filtering can be a key element for encoding and protecting quantum states, suggesting an emerging field of symmetry-protected universal quantum computation and noisy intermediate-scale quantum technologies.

Quasicrystals exhibit exotic properties inherited from the self-similarity of their long-range ordered, yet aperiodic, structure. The recent realization of optical quasicrystal lattices paves the way to the study of correlated Bose fluids in such structures, but the regime of strong interactions remains largely unexplored, both theoretically and experimentally. Here, we determine the quantum phase diagram of two-dimensional correlated bosons in an eightfold quasicrystal potential. Using large-scale quantum Monte Carlo calculations, we demonstrate a superfluid-to-Bose glass transition and determine the critical line. Moreover, we show that strong interactions stabilize Mott insulator phases, some of which have spontaneously broken eightfold symmetry. Our results are directly relevant to current generation experiments and, in particular, drive prospects to the observation of the still elusive Bose glass phase in two dimensions and exotic Mott phases.

Strongly disordered systems in the many-body localized (MBL) phase can exhibit ground state order in highly excited eigenstates. The interplay between localization, symmetry, and topology has led to the characterization of a broad landscape of MBL phases ranging from spin glasses and time crystals to symmetry protected topological phases. Understanding the nature of phase transitions between these different forms of eigenstate order remains an essential open question. Here, we conjecture that no direct transition between distinct MBL orders can occur in one dimension; rather, an ergodic phase always intervenes. Motivated by recent advances in Rydberg-atom-based quantum simulation, we propose an experimental protocol where the intervening ergodic phase can be diagnosed via the dynamics of local observables.