We present an optimal protocol for encoding an unknown qubit state into a multiqubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger-like state and, consequently, transferring quantum information in large systems exhibiting power-law ($1/r^{\alpha }$) interactions. For all power-law exponents $\alpha$ between $d$ and $2d+1$, where $d$ is the dimension of the system, the protocol yields a polynomial speed-up for $\alpha >2d$ and a superpolynomial speed-up for $\alpha \le 2d$, compared to the state of the art. For all $\alpha >d$, the protocol saturates the Lieb-Robinson bounds (up to subpolynomial corrections), thereby establishing the optimality of the protocol and the tightness of the bounds in this regime. The protocol has a wide range of applications, including in quantum sensing, quantum computing, and preparation of topologically ordered states. In addition, the protocol provides a lower bound on the gate count in digital simulations of power-law interacting systems.

Distributed quantum sensing can provide quantum-enhanced sensitivity beyond the shot-noise limit (SNL) for sensing spatially distributed parameters. To date, distributed quantum sensing experiments have mostly been accomplished in laboratory environments without a real space separation for the sensors. In addition, the post-selection is normally assumed to demonstrate the sensitivity advantage over the SNL. Here, we demonstrate distributed quantum sensing with discrete variables in field and show the unconditional violation (without post-selection) of SNL up to 0.916 dB for the field distance of 240 m. The achievement is based on a loophole-free Bell test setup with entangled photon pairs at the averaged heralding efficiency of 73.88%. Moreover, to test quantum sensing in real life, we demonstrate the experiment for long distances (with 10-km fiber), together with the sensing of a completely random parameter. The results represent an important step towards a practical quantum sensing network for widespread applications.

We introduce the time-dependent density matrix renormalization group (tDMRG) as a solution to a long-standing problem in spintronics—how to describe spin-transfer torque (STT) between flowing spins of conduction electrons and localized spins within a magnetic material by treating the dynamics of both spin species fully quantum mechanically. In contrast to conventional Slonczewski-Berger STT, where the localized spins are viewed as classical vectors obeying the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation and where their STT-driven dynamics is initiated only when the spin polarization of flowing electrons and localized spins are noncollinear, quantum STT can occur when these vectors are collinear but antiparallel. Using tDMRG, we simulate the time evolution of a many-body quantum state of electrons and localized spins, where the former are injected as a spin-polarized current pulse while the latter comprise a quantum Heisenberg ferromagnetic metallic (FM) spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ $XXZ$ chain initially in the ground state with spin polarization antiparallel to that of injected electrons. The quantum STT reverses the direction of localized spins, but without rotation from the initial orientation, when the number of injected electrons exceeds the number of localized spins. Such nonclassical reversal, which is absent from Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert dynamics, is strikingly inhomogeneous across the FM chain, and it can be accompanied by reduction of the magnetization associated with localized spins, even to zero at specific locations. This feature arises because quantum STT generates a highly entangled nonequilibrium many-body state of all flowing and localized spins, despite starting from the initially unentangled ground state of a mundane FM. Furthermore, the mutual information between localized spins at the FM edges remains nonzero even at infinite separation as the signature of dynamical buildup of long-range entanglement. The growth in time of entanglement entropy differentiates between the quantum and conventional (i.e., noncollinear) setups for STT, reaching a much larger asymptotic value in the former case.

High-fidelity two-qubit gates at scale are a key requirement to realize the full promise of quantum computation and simulation. The advent and use of coupler elements to tunably control two-qubit interactions has improved operational fidelity in many-qubit systems by reducing parasitic coupling and frequency crowding issues. Nonetheless, two-qubit gate errors still limit the capability of near-term quantum applications. The reason, in part, is that the existing framework for tunable couplers based on the dispersive approximation does not fully incorporate three-body multilevel dynamics, which is essential for addressing coherent leakage to the coupler and parasitic longitudinal ($ZZ$) interactions during two-qubit gates. Here, we present a systematic approach that goes beyond the dispersive approximation to exploit the engineered level structure of the coupler and optimize its control. Using this approach, we experimentally demonstrate CZ and $ZZ$-free iSWAP gates with two-qubit interaction fidelities of $99.76\pm 0.07\%$ and $99.87\pm 0.23\%$, respectively, which are close to their $T_1$ limits.

Variational quantum circuits (VQCs) built upon noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware, in conjunction with classical processing, constitute a promising architecture for quantum simulations, classical optimization, and machine learning. However, the required VQC depth to demonstrate a quantum advantage over classical schemes is beyond the reach of available NISQ devices. Supervised learning assisted by an entangled sensor network (SLAEN) is a distinct paradigm that harnesses VQCs trained by classical machine-learning algorithms to tailor multipartite entanglement shared by sensors for solving practically useful data-processing problems. Here, we report the first experimental demonstration of SLAEN and show an entanglement-enabled reduction in the error probability for classification of multidimensional radio-frequency signals. Our work paves a new route for quantum-enhanced data processing and its applications in the NISQ era.

Causality is a seminal concept in science: Any research discipline, from sociology and medicine to physics and chemistry, aims at understanding the causes that could explain the correlations observed among some measured variables. While several methods exist to characterize classical causal models, no general construction is known for the quantum case. In this work, we present quantum inflation, a systematic technique to falsify if a given quantum causal model is compatible with some observed correlations. We demonstrate the power of the technique by reproducing known results and solving open problems for some paradigmatic examples of causal networks. Our results may find applications in many fields: from the characterization of correlations in quantum networks to the study of quantum effects in thermodynamic and biological processes.

Two widely used but distinct approaches to the dynamics of open quantum systems are the Nakajima-Zwanzig and time-convolutionless quantum master equation, respectively. Although both describe identical quantum evolutions with strong memory effects, the first uses a time-nonlocal memory kernel $\mathcal{K}$, whereas the second achieves the same using a time-local generator $\mathcal{G}$. Here we show that the two are connected by a simple yet general fixed-point relation: $\mathcal{G}=\widehat{\mathcal{K}}[\mathcal{G}]$. This allows one to extract nontrivial relations between the two completely different ways of computing the time evolution and combine their strengths. We first discuss the stationary generator, which enables a Markov approximation that is both nonperturbative and completely positive for a large class of evolutions. We show that this generator is not equal to the low-frequency limit of the memory kernel, but additionally “samples” it at nonzero characteristic frequencies. This clarifies the subtle roles of frequency dependence and semigroup factorization in existing Markov approximation strategies. Second, we prove that the fixed-point equation sums up the time-domain gradient or Moyal expansion for the time-nonlocal quantum master equation, providing nonperturbative insight into the generation of memory effects. Finally, we show that the fixed-point relation enables a direct iterative numerical computation of both the stationary and the transient generator from a given memory kernel. For the transient generator this produces nonsemigroup approximations which are constrained to be both initially and asymptotically accurate at each iteration step.

Recent experimental and theoretical works have made much progress toward understanding nonequilibrium phenomena in thermalizing systems, which act as thermal baths for their small subsystems, and many-body localized systems, which fail to do so. The description of time evolution in many-body systems is generally challenging due to the dynamical generation of quantum entanglement. In this work, we introduce an approach to study quantum many-body dynamics, inspired by the Feynman-Vernon influence functional. Focusing on a family of interacting, Floquet spin chains, we consider a Keldysh path-integral description of the dynamics. The central object in our approach is the influence matrix, which describes the effect of the system on the dynamics of a local subsystem. For translationally invariant models, we formulate a self-consistency equation for the influence matrix. For certain special values of the model parameters, we obtain an exact solution which represents a perfect dephaser (PD). Physically, a PD corresponds to a many-body system that acts as a perfectly Markovian bath on itself: at each period, it measures every spin. For the models considered here, we establish that PD points include dual-unitary circuits investigated in recent works. In the vicinity of PD points, the system is not perfectly Markovian, but rather acts as a bath with a short memory time. In this case, we demonstrate that the self-consistency equation can be solved using matrix-product states (MPS) methods, as the influence matrix temporal entanglement is low. A combination of analytical insights and MPS computations allows us to characterize the structure of the influence matrix in terms of an effective “statistical-mechanics” description. We finally illustrate the predictive power of this description by analytically computing how quickly an embedded impurity spin thermalizes. The influence matrix approach formulated here provides an intuitive view of the quantum many-body dynamics problem, opening a path to constructing models of thermalizing dynamics that are solvable or can be efficiently treated by MPS-based methods and to further characterizing quantum ergodicity or lack thereof.

Quantum many-body states that frequently appear in physics often obey an entropy scaling law, meaning that an entanglement entropy of a subsystem can be expressed as a sum of terms that scale linearly with its volume and area, plus a correction term that is independent of its size. We conjecture that these states have an efficient dual description in terms of a set of marginal density matrices on bounded regions, obeying the same entropy scaling law locally. We prove a restricted version of this conjecture for translationally invariant systems in two spatial dimensions. Specifically, we prove that a translationally invariant marginal obeying three nonlinear constraints—all of which follow from the entropy scaling law straightforwardly—must be consistent with some global state on an infinite lattice. Moreover, we derive a closed-form expression for the maximum-entropy density compatible with those marginals, deriving a variational upper bound on the thermodynamic free energy. The main assumptions of our construction are satisfied exactly by solvable models of topological order and approximately by finite-temperature Gibbs states of certain quantum spin Hamiltonians.

We demonstrate a controlled-Z gate between capacitively coupled fluxonium qubits with transition frequencies 72.3 and 136.3 MHz. The gate is activated by a 61.6-ns-long pulse at a frequency between noncomputational transitions $|10⟩-|20⟩$ and $|11⟩-|21⟩$, during which the qubits complete only four and eight Larmor periods, respectively. The measured gate error of $(8\pm 1)\times {10}^{-3}$ is limited by decoherence in the noncomputational subspace, which will likely improve in the next-generation devices. Although our qubits are about 50 times slower than transmons, the two-qubit gate is faster than microwave-activated gates on transmons, and the gate error is on par with the lowest reported. Architectural advantages of low-frequency fluxoniums include long qubit coherence time, weak hybridization in the computational subspace, suppressed residual $ZZ$-coupling rate (here 46 kHz), and the absence of either excessive parameter-matching or complex pulse-shaping requirements.

We investigate the problem of simulating classical stochastic processes through quantum dynamics and present three scenarios where memory or time quantum advantages arise. First, by introducing and analyzing a quantum version of the embeddability problem for stochastic matrices, we show that quantum memoryless dynamics can simulate classical processes that necessarily require memory. Second, by extending the notion of space-time cost of a stochastic process $P$ to the quantum domain, we prove an advantage of the quantum cost of simulating $P$ over the classical cost. Third, we demonstrate that the set of classical states accessible via Markovian master equations with quantum controls is larger than the set of those accessible with classical controls, leading, e.g., to a potential advantage in cooling protocols.

Landauer’s principle asserts that any computation has an unavoidable energy cost that grows proportionally to its degree of logical irreversibility. But even a logically reversible operation, when run on a physical processor that operates on different energy levels, requires energy. Here we quantify this energy requirement, providing upper and lower bounds that coincide up to a constant factor. We derive these bounds from a general quantum resource-theoretic argument, which implies that the initial resource requirement for implementing a unitary operation within an error $\epsilon$ grows like $1/\sqrt{\epsilon }$ times the amount of resource generated by the operation. Applying these results to quantum circuits, we find that their energy requirement can, by an appropriate design, be made independent of their time complexity.

The dynamics of quantum information in strongly interacting systems, known as quantum information scrambling, has recently become a common thread in our understanding of black holes, transport in exotic non-Fermi liquids, and many-body analogs of quantum chaos. To date, verified experimental implementations of scrambling have focused on systems composed of two-level qubits. Higher-dimensional quantum systems, however, may exhibit different scrambling modalities and are predicted to saturate conjectured speed limits on the rate of quantum information scrambling. We take the first steps toward accessing such phenomena, by realizing a quantum processor based on superconducting qutrits (three-level quantum systems). We demonstrate the implementation of universal two-qutrit scrambling operations and embed them in a five-qutrit quantum teleportation protocol. Measured teleportation fidelities $F_{\mathrm{avg}}=0.568\pm 0.001$ confirm the presence of scrambling even in the presence of experimental imperfections and decoherence. Our teleportation protocol, which connects to recent proposals for studying traversable wormholes in the laboratory, demonstrates how quantum technology that encodes information in higher-dimensional systems can exploit a larger and more connected state space to achieve the resource efficient encoding of complex quantum circuits.

Quantum catalysis is a fascinating concept that demonstrates how certain transformations can only become possible when given access to a specific resource that has to be returned unaffected. It was first discovered in the context of entanglement theory, and since then, it has been applied in a number of resource-theoretic frameworks, including quantum thermodynamics. Although, in that case, the necessary (and sometimes also sufficient) conditions on the existence of a catalyst are known, almost nothing is known about the precise form of the catalyst state required by the transformation. In particular, it is not clear whether it has to have some special properties or be finely tuned to the desired transformation. In this work, we describe a surprising property of multicopy states: We show that in resource theories governed by majorization, all resourceful states are catalysts for all allowed transformations. In quantum thermodynamics, this means that the so-called “second laws of thermodynamics” do not require a fine-tuned catalyst; rather, any state, given sufficiently many copies, can serve as a useful catalyst. These analytic results are accompanied by several numerical investigations that indicate that neither a multicopy form nor a very-large-dimension catalyst is required to activate most allowed transformations catalytically.

One of the most fundamental problems in quantum many-body physics is the characterization of correlations among thermal states. Of particular relevance is the thermal area law, which justifies the tensor network approximations to thermal states with a bond dimension growing polynomially with the system size. In the regime of sufficiently low temperatures, which is crucially important for practical applications, the existing techniques do not yield optimal bounds. Here, we propose a new thermal area law that holds for generic many-body systems on lattices. We improve the temperature dependence from the original $\mathcal{O}(\beta )$ to $\mathcal{O}({\beta }^{2/3})$ up to a logarithmic factor, thereby suggesting subballistic propagation of entanglement by imaginary-time evolution. This qualitatively differs from the real-time evolution, which usually induces linear growth of entanglement. We also prove analogous bounds for the Rényi entanglement of purification and the entanglement of formation. Our analysis is based on a polynomial approximation to the exponential function which provides a relationship between the imaginary-time evolution and random walks. Moreover, for one-dimensional (1D) systems with $n$ spins, we prove that the Gibbs state is well approximated by a matrix product operator with a sublinear bond dimension for $\beta =o[\log (n)]$. This proof allows us to rigorously establish, for the first time, a quasilinear time classical algorithm for constructing a matrix product state representation of 1D quantum Gibbs states at arbitrary temperatures of $\beta =o[\log (n)]$. Our new technical ingredient is a block decomposition of the Gibbs state that bears a resemblance to the decomposition of real-time evolution given by Haah et al. [Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE 59th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) (IEEE, New York, 2018), pp. 350–360].

According to thermodynamics, the inevitable increase of entropy allows the past to be distinguished from the future. From this perspective, any clock must incorporate an irreversible process that allows this flow of entropy to be tracked. In addition, an integral part of a clock is a clockwork, that is, a system whose purpose is to temporally concentrate the irreversible events that drive this entropic flow, thereby increasing the accuracy of the resulting clock ticks compared to counting purely random equilibration events. In this article, we formalize the task of autonomous temporal probability concentration as the inherent goal of any clockwork based on thermal gradients. Within this framework, we show that a perfect clockwork can be approximated arbitrarily well by increasing its complexity. Furthermore, we combine such an idealized clockwork model, comprised of many qubits, with an irreversible decay mechanism to showcase the ultimate thermodynamic limits to the measurement of time.

Agile cryptography allows for a resource-efficient swap of a cryptographic core in case the security of an underlying classical cryptographic algorithm becomes compromised. Conversely, versatile cryptography allows the user to switch the cryptographic task without requiring any knowledge of its inner workings. In this paper, we suggest how these related principles can be applied to the field of quantum cryptography by explicitly demonstrating two quantum cryptographic protocols, quantum digital signatures (QDS) and quantum secret sharing (QSS), on the same hardware sender and receiver platform. Crucially, the protocols differ only in their classical postprocessing. The system is also suitable for quantum key distribution (QKD) and is highly compatible with deployed telecommunication infrastructures, since it uses standard quadrature phase-shift keying encoding and heterodyne detection. For the first time, QDS protocols are modified to allow for postselection at the receiver, enhancing protocol performance. The cryptographic primitives QDS and QSS are inherently multipartite, and we prove that they are secure not only when a player internal to the task is dishonest, but also when (external) eavesdropping on the quantum channel is allowed. In our first proof-of-principle demonstration of an agile and versatile quantum communication system, the quantum states are distributed at GHz rates. A 1-bit message may be securely signed using our QDS protocols in less than 0.05 ms over a 2-km fiber link and in less than 0.2 s over a 20-km fiber link. To our knowledge, this also marks the first demonstration of a continuous-variable direct QSS protocol.

We present a circuit design composed of two Josephson junctions coupled by a nonreciprocal element, the gyrator, whose ground space is doubly degenerate. The ground states are approximate code words of the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill code. We determine the low-energy dynamics of the circuit by working out the equivalence of this system to the problem of a single electron in a crystal, confined to a two-dimensional plane, and subjected to a strong, homogeneous magnetic field. We find that the circuit is naturally protected against the common noise channels in superconducting circuits, such as charge and flux noise, implying that it can be used for passive quantum error correction. We also propose realistic design parameters for an experimental realization, and we describe possible protocols to perform logical one- and two-qubit gates, state preparation, and readout.

Unitary circuits subject to repeated projective measurements can undergo an entanglement phase transition (EPT) as a function of the measurement rate. This transition is generally understood in terms of a competition between the scrambling effects of unitary dynamics and the disentangling effects of measurements. We find that, surprisingly, EPTs are possible even in the absence of scrambling unitary dynamics, where they are best understood as arising from measurements alone. This finding motivates us to introduce measurement-only models, in which the “scrambling” and “unscrambling” effects driving the EPT are fundamentally intertwined and cannot be attributed to physically distinct processes. These models represent a novel form of an EPT, conceptually distinct from that in hybrid unitary-projective circuits. We explore the entanglement phase diagrams, critical points, and quantum code properties of some of these measurement-only models. We find that the principle driving the EPTs in these models is frustration, or mutual incompatibility, of the measurements. Surprisingly, an entangling (volume-law) phase is the generic outcome when measuring sufficiently long but still local ($\gtrsim 3$-body) operators. We identify a class of exceptions to this behavior (“bipartite ensembles”) which cannot sustain an entangling phase but display dual area-law phases, possibly with different kinds of quantum order, separated by self-dual critical points. Finally, we introduce a measure of information spreading in dynamics with measurements and use it to demonstrate the emergence of a statistical light cone, despite the nonlocality inherent to quantum measurements.

The estimation of multiple parameters in quantum metrology is important for a vast array of applications in quantum information processing. However, the unattainability of fundamental precision bounds for incompatible observables greatly diminishes the applicability of estimation theory in many practical implementations. The Holevo Cramér-Rao bound (HCRB) provides the most fundamental, simultaneously attainable bound for multiparameter estimation problems. A general closed form for the HCRB is not known given that it requires a complex optimization over multiple variables. In this work, we develop an analytic approach to solving the HCRB for two parameters. Our analysis reveals the role of the HCRB and its interplay with alternative bounds in estimation theory. For more parameters, we generate a lower bound to the HCRB. Our work greatly reduces the complexity of determining the HCRB to solving a set of linear equations that even numerically permits a quadratic speedup over previous state-of-the-art approaches. We apply our results to compare the performance of different probe states in magnetic field sensing and characterize the performance of state tomography on the code space of noisy bosonic error-correcting codes. The sensitivity of state tomography on noisy binomial code states can be improved by tuning two coding parameters that relate to the number of correctable phase and amplitude damping errors. Our work provides fundamental insights and makes significant progress toward the estimation of multiple incompatible observables.