Matrix product states and projected entangled pair states (PEPS) are powerful analytical and numerical tools to assess quantum many-body systems in one and higher dimensions, respectively. While matrix product states are comprehensively understood, in PEPS fundamental questions, relevant analytically as well as numerically, remain open, such as how to encode symmetries in full generality, or how to stabilize numerical methods using canonical forms. Here, we show that these key problems, as well as a number of related questions, are algorithmically undecidable, that is, they cannot be fully resolved in a systematic way. Our work thereby exposes fundamental limitations to a full and unbiased understanding of quantum many-body systems using PEPS.

We report long coherence times (up to 300 ms) for near-surface bismuth donor electron spins in silicon coupled to a superconducting microresonator, biased at a clock transition. This enables us to demonstrate the partial absorption of a train of weak microwave fields in the spin ensemble, their storage for 100 ms, and their retrieval, using a Hahn-echo-like protocol. Phase coherence and quantum statistics are preserved in the storage.

Measurement-driven transitions between extensive and subextensive scaling of the entanglement entropy receive interest as they illuminate the intricate physics of thermalization and control in open interacting quantum systems. While this transition is well established for stroboscopic measurements in random quantum circuits, a crucial link to physical settings is its extension to continuous observations, where for an integrable model it has been shown that the transition changes its nature and becomes immediate. Here, we demonstrate that the entanglement transition at finite coupling persists if the continuously measured system is randomly nonintegrable, and show that it is smoothly connected to the transition in the stroboscopic models. This provides a bridge between a wide range of experimental settings and the wealth of knowledge accumulated for the latter systems.

We propose a hybrid quantum-classical atomic clock where the interrogation of atoms prepared in a spin-coherent (or weakly squeezed) state is used to feed back one or more highly spin-squeezed atomic states toward their optimal phase-sensitivity point. The hybrid clock overcomes the stability of a single Ramsey clock using coherent or optimal spin-squeezed states and reaches a Heisenberg-limited stability while avoiding nondestructive measurements. When optimized with respect to the total number of particles, the protocol surpasses the state-of-the-art proposals that use Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger or NOON states. We compare analytical predictions with numerical simulations of clock operations, including correlated $1/f$ local oscillator noise.

The finite-time dynamics, apart from its fundamental importance in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, is of great significance in designing heat engine cycles. We build an experimental apparatus to test the predicted long-time $1/\tau$ scaling of the irreversible entropy generation in the finite-time ($\tau$) thermodynamic process by compressing dry air in a temperature-controlled water bath. We present the first direct experimental validation of the scaling, utilized in many finite-time thermodynamic models at the long-time regime. The experimental data also demonstrate a clear deviation from the scaling at the short-time regime. We show the optimal control scheme to minimize the irreversible entropy generation in finite-time process. Such optimization shall bring new insight to the practical design of heat engine cycles.

Quantum no-cloning, the impossibility of perfectly cloning an arbitrary unknown quantum state, is one of the most fundamental limitations due to the laws of quantum mechanics, which underpin the physical security of quantum key distribution. Quantum physics does allow, however, approximate cloning with either imperfect state fidelity and/or probabilistic success. Whereas approximate quantum cloning of single-particle states has been tested previously, experimental cloning of quantum entanglement—a highly nonclassical correlation—remained unexplored. Based on a multiphoton linear optics platform, we demonstrate quantum cloning of two-photon entangled states for the first time. Remarkably our results show that one maximally entangled photon pair can be broadcast into two entangled pairs, both with state fidelities above 50%. Our results are a key step towards cloning of complex quantum systems, and are likely to provide new insights into quantum entanglement.

When an observable is measured on an evolving coherent quantum system twice, the first measurement generally alters the statistics of the second one, which is known as measurement backaction. We introduce, and push to its theoretical and experimental limits, a novel method of backaction evasion, whereby entangled collective measurements are performed on several copies of the system. This method is inspired by a similar idea designed for the problem of measuring quantum work [Perarnau-Llobet et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 070601 (2017)]. By using entanglement as a resource, we show that the backaction can be extremely suppressed compared to all previous schemes. Importantly, the backaction can be eliminated in highly coherent processes.

Bell inequalities are central tools for studying nonlocal correlations and their applications in quantum information processing. Identifying inequalities for many particles or measurements is, however, difficult due to the computational complexity of characterizing the set of local correlations. We develop a method to characterize Bell inequalities under constraints, which may be given by symmetry or other linear conditions. This allows one to search systematically for generalizations of given Bell inequalities to more parties. As an example, we find all possible generalizations of the two-particle inequality by Froissart [Nuovo Cimento Soc. Ital. Fis. B 64, 241 (1981)], also known as I3322 inequality, to three particles. For the simplest of these inequalities, we study their quantum mechanical properties and demonstrate that they are relevant, in the sense that they detect nonlocality of quantum states, for which all two-setting inequalities fail to do so.

The ${\mathbb{Z}}_2\times {\mathbb{Z}}_2$ symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phase hosts a robust boundary qubit at zero temperature. At finite energy density, the SPT phase is destroyed and bulk observables equilibrate in finite time. Nevertheless, we predict parametric regimes in which the boundary qubit survives to arbitrarily high temperature, with an exponentially longer coherence time than that of the thermal bulk degrees of freedom. In a dual picture, the persistence of the qubit stems from the inability of the bulk to absorb the virtual ${\mathbb{Z}}_2\times {\mathbb{Z}}_2$ domain walls emitted by the edge during the relaxation process. We confirm the long coherence times via exact diagonalization and connect it to the presence of a pair of conjugate almost strong zero modes. Our results provide a route to experimentally construct long-lived coherent boundary qubits at infinite temperature in disorder-free systems. To this end, we propose and analyze an implementation using a Rydberg optical-tweezer array and demonstrate that the difference between edge- and bulk-spin autocorrelators can be distinguished on timescales significantly shorter than the typical coherence time.

Quasicrystals are long-range ordered but not periodic, representing an interesting middle ground between order and disorder. We experimentally and numerically study the localization transition in the ground state of noninteracting and weakly interacting bosons in an eightfold symmetric quasicrystalline optical lattice. In contrast to typically used real space in situ techniques, we probe the system in momentum space by recording matter wave diffraction patterns. Shallow lattices lead to extended states whereas we observe a localization transition at a critical lattice depth of $V_0\approx 1.78(2)E_{\mathrm{rec}}$ for the noninteracting system. Our measurements and Gross-Pitaevskii simulations demonstrate that in interacting systems the transition is shifted to deeper lattices, as expected from superfluid order counteracting localization. Quasiperiodic potentials, lacking conventional rare regions, provide the ideal testing ground to realize many-body localization in 2D.

We show that continuous quantum nondemolition (QND) measurement of an atomic ensemble is able to improve the precision of frequency estimation even in the presence of independent dephasing acting on each atom. We numerically simulate the dynamics of an ensemble with up to $N=150$ atoms initially prepared in a (classical) spin coherent state, and we show that, thanks to the spin squeezing dynamically generated by the measurement, the information obtainable from the continuous photocurrent scales superclassically with respect to the number of atoms $N$. We provide evidence that such superclassical scaling holds for different values of dephasing and monitoring efficiency. We moreover calculate the extra information obtainable via a final strong measurement on the conditional states generated during the dynamics and show that the corresponding ultimate limit is nearly achieved via a projective measurement of the spin-squeezed collective spin operator. We also briefly discuss the difference between our protocol and standard estimation schemes, where the state preparation time is neglected.

Potts spin systems play a fundamental role in statistical mechanics and quantum field theory and can be studied within the spin, the Fortuin–Kasteleyn (FK) bond or the $q$-flow (loop) representation. We introduce a Loop-Cluster (LC) joint model of bond-occupation variables interacting with $q$-flow variables and formulate an LC algorithm that is found to be in the same dynamical universality as the celebrated Swendsen–Wang algorithm. This leads to a theoretical unification for all the representations, and numerically, one can apply the most efficient algorithm in one representation and measure physical quantities in others. Moreover, by using the LC scheme, we construct a hierarchy of geometric objects that contain as special cases the $q$-flow clusters and the backbone of FK clusters, the exact values of whose fractal dimensions in two dimensions remain as an open question. Our work not only provides a unified framework and an efficient algorithm for the Potts model but also brings new insights into the rich geometric structures of the FK clusters.

We propose a method for detecting bipartite entanglement in a many-body mixed state based on estimating moments of the partially transposed density matrix. The estimates are obtained by performing local random measurements on the state, followed by postprocessing using the classical shadows framework. Our method can be applied to any quantum system with single-qubit control. We provide a detailed analysis of the required number of experimental runs, and demonstrate the protocol using existing experimental data [Brydges et al., Science 364, 260 (2019)].

Entanglement plays a central role in quantum information processing and quantum physics. However, few effective ways are known to detect the amount of entanglement of an unknown quantum state. Here, we propose a scheme to estimate the entanglement negativity for any bipartition of a composite system. The proposed scheme is based on the random unitary evolution and local measurements on a single-copy quantum state, which is more practical compared to former methods based on collective measurements on many copies of the identical state. Meanwhile, we generalize the scheme to quantify the total correlation. We demonstrate the efficiency of the scheme with statistical analyses and numerical simulations. Our scheme is quite suitable for state-of-the-art quantum platforms, which can serve as a useful benchmarking tool to advance quantum technologies and a probe to study fundamental quantum physics like entanglement dynamics.

For building a scalable quantum processor with superconducting qubits, $ZZ$ interaction is of great concern because its residual has a crucial impact to two-qubit gate fidelity. Two-qubit gates with fidelity meeting the criterion of fault-tolerant quantum computation have been demonstrated using $ZZ$ interaction. However, as the performance of quantum processors improves, the residual static $ZZ$ can become a performance-limiting factor for quantum gate operation and quantum error correction. Here, we introduce a superconducting architecture using qubits with opposite-sign anharmonicity, a transmon qubit, and a $C$-shunt flux qubit, to address this issue. We theoretically demonstrate that by coupling the two types of qubits, the high-contrast $ZZ$ interaction can be realized. Thus, we can control the interaction with a high on-off ratio to implement two-qubit controlled-$Z$ gates, or suppress it during two-qubit gate operation using $XY$ interaction (e.g., an iSWAP gate). The proposed architecture can also be scaled up to multiqubit cases. In a fixed coupled system, $ZZ$ crosstalk related to neighboring spectator qubits could also be heavily suppressed.

Mitigating crosstalk errors, whether classical or quantum mechanical, is critically important for achieving high-fidelity entangling gates in multiqubit circuits. For weakly anharmonic superconducting qubits, unwanted $ZZ$ interactions can be suppressed by combining qubits with opposite anharmonicity. We present experimental measurements and theoretical modeling of two-qubit gate error for gates based on the cross resonance interaction between a capacitively shunted flux qubit and a transmon, and demonstrate the elimination of the $ZZ$ interaction.

Recent research has considered the stochastic thermodynamics of multiple interacting systems, representing the overall system as a Bayes net. I derive fluctuation theorems governing the entropy production (EP) of arbitrary sets of the systems in such a Bayes net. I also derive “conditional” fluctuation theorems, governing the distribution of EP in one set of systems conditioned on the EP of a different set of systems. I then derive thermodynamic uncertainty relations relating the EP of the overall system to the precisions of probability currents within the individual systems.

We study the decay rate $\theta (a)$ that characterizes the late time exponential decay of the first-passage probability density $F_a(t|0)\sim e^{-\theta (a)t}$ of a diffusing particle in a one dimensional confining potential $U(x)$, starting from the origin, to a position located at $a>0$. For general confining potential $U(x)$ we show that $\theta (a)$, a measure of the barrier (located at $a$) crossing rate, has three distinct behaviors as a function of $a$, depending on the tail of $U(x)$ as $x\to -\infty$. In particular, for potentials behaving as $U(x)\sim |x|$ when $x\to -\infty$, we show that a novel freezing transition occurs at a critical value $a=a_c$, i.e., $\theta (a)$ increases monotonically as $a$ decreases till $a_c$, and for $a\le a_c$ it freezes to $\theta (a)=\theta (a_c)$. Our results are established using a general mapping to a quantum problem and by exact solution in three representative cases, supported by numerical simulations. We show that the freezing transition occurs when in the associated quantum problem, the gap between the ground state (bound) and the continuum of scattering states vanishes.