A ubiquitous problem in quantum physics is to understand the ground-state properties of many-body systems. Confronted with the fact that exact diagonalization quickly becomes impossible when increasing the system size, variational approaches are typically employed as a scalable alternative: Energy is minimized over a subset of all possible states and then different physical quantities are computed over the solution state. Despite remarkable success, rigorously speaking, all that variational methods offer are upper bounds on the ground-state energy. On the other hand, so-called relaxations of the ground-state problem based on semidefinite programming represent a complementary approach, providing lower bounds to the ground-state energy. However, in their current implementation, neither variational nor relaxation methods offer provable bound on other observables in the ground state beyond the energy. In this work, we show that the combination of the two classes of approaches can be used to derive certifiable bounds on the value of any observable in the ground state, such as correlation functions of arbitrary order, structure factors, or order parameters. We illustrate the power of this approach in paradigmatic examples of 1D and 2D spin-$1/2$ Heisenberg models. To improve the scalability of the method, we exploit the symmetries and sparsity of the considered systems to reach sizes of hundreds of particles at much higher precision than previous works. Our analysis therefore shows how to obtain certifiable bounds on many-body ground-state properties beyond energy in a scalable way.

An important outstanding challenge that must be overcome in order to fully utilize the XY surface code for correcting biased Pauli noise is the phenomenon of fragile temporal boundaries that arises during the standard logical state-preparation and measurement protocols. To address this challenge we propose a new logical state-preparation protocol based on locally entangling qubits into small Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger-like states prior to making the stabilizer measurements that place them in the XY-code state. We prove that in this new procedure $O(\sqrt{n})$ high-rate errors along a single lattice boundary can cause a logical failure, leading to an almost quadratic reduction in the number of fault configurations compared to the standard state-preparation approach. Moreover, the code becomes equivalent to a repetition code for high-rate errors, guaranteeing a 50% code-capacity threshold during state preparation for infinitely biased noise. With a simple matching decoder we confirm that our preparation protocol outperforms the standard protocol in terms of both threshold and logical error rate in the fault-tolerant regime where measurements are unreliable and at experimentally realistic biases. We also discuss how our state-preparation protocol can be inverted for similar fragile-boundary-mitigated logical-state measurement.

A fundamental distinction between many-body quantum states are those with short- and long-range entanglement (SRE and LRE). The latter cannot be created by finite-depth circuits, underscoring the nonlocal nature of Schrödinger cat states, topological order, and quantum criticality. Remarkably, examples are known where LRE is obtained by performing single-site measurements on SRE, such as the toric code from measuring a sublattice of a 2D cluster state. However, a systematic understanding of when and how measurements of SRE give rise to LRE is still lacking. Here, we establish that LRE appears upon performing measurements on symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases—of which the cluster state is one example. For instance, we show how to implement the Kramers-Wannier transformation by adding a cluster SPT to an input state followed by measurement. This transformation naturally relates states with SRE and LRE. An application is the realization of double-semion order when the input state is the ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ Levin-Gu SPT. Similarly, the addition of fermionic SPTs and measurement leads to an implementation of the Jordan-Wigner transformation of a general state. More generally, we argue that a large class of SPT phases protected by $G\times H$ symmetry gives rise to anomalous LRE upon measuring $G$-charges, and we prove that this persists for generic points in the SPT phase under certain conditions. Our work introduces a new practical tool for using SPT phases as resources for creating LRE, and we uncover the classification result that all states related by sequentially gauging Abelian groups or by Jordan-Wigner transformation are in the same equivalence class, once we augment finite-depth circuits with single-site measurements. In particular, any topological or fracton order with a solvable finite gauge group can be obtained from a product state in this way.

Programmable quantum devices are now able to probe wave functions at unprecedented levels. This is based on the ability to project the many-body state of atom and qubit arrays onto a measurement basis which produces snapshots of the system wave function. Extracting and processing information from such observations remains, however, an open quest. One often resorts to analyzing low-order correlation functions—that is, discarding most of the available information content. Here, we introduce wave-function networks—a mathematical framework to describe wave-function snapshots based on network theory. For many-body systems, these networks can become scale-free—a mathematical structure that has found tremendous success and applications in a broad set of fields, ranging from biology to epidemics to Internet science. We demonstrate the potential of applying these techniques to quantum science by introducing protocols to extract the Kolmogorov complexity corresponding to the output of a quantum simulator and implementing tools for fully scalable cross-platform certification based on similarity tests between networks. We demonstrate the emergence of scale-free networks analyzing experimental data obtained with a Rydberg quantum simulator manipulating up to 100 atoms. Our approach illustrates how, upon crossing a phase transition, the simulator complexity decreases while correlation length increases—a direct signature of buildup of universal behavior in data space. Comparing experiments with numerical simulations, we achieve cross-certification at the wave-function level up to timescales of $4\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{s}$ with a confidence level of 90% and determine experimental calibration intervals with unprecedented accuracy. Our framework is generically applicable to the output of quantum computers and simulators with in situ access to the system wave function and requires probing accuracy and repetition rates accessible to most currently available platforms.

We derive an exact solution for the steady state of a setup where two $XX$-coupled $N$-qubit spin chains (with possibly nonuniform couplings) are subject to boundary Rabi drives and common boundary loss generated by a waveguide (either bidirectional or unidirectional). For a wide range of parameters, this system has a pure entangled steady state, providing a means for stabilizing remote multiqubit entanglement without the use of squeezed light. Our solution also provides insights into a single boundary-driven dissipative $XX$ spin chain that maps to an interacting fermionic model. The nonequilibrium steady state exhibits surprising correlation effects, including an emergent pairing of hole excitations that arises from dynamically constrained hopping. Our system could be implemented in a number of experimental platforms, including circuit QED.

Coherence time and gate fidelities in Rydberg atom quantum simulators and computers are fundamentally limited by the Rydberg state lifetime. Circular Rydberg states are highly promising candidates to overcome this limitation by orders of magnitude, as they can be effectively protected from decay due to their maximum angular momentum. We report the first realization of alkaline-earth circular Rydberg atoms trapped in optical tweezers, which provide unique and novel control possibilities due to the optically active ionic core. Specifically, we demonstrate creation of very high-$n$ ($n=79$) circular states of ${}^{88}\mathrm{Sr}$. We measure lifetimes as long as 2.55 ms at room temperature, which are achieved via cavity-assisted suppression of black-body radiation. We show coherent control of a microwave qubit encoded in circular states of nearby manifolds, and characterize the qubit coherence time via Ramsey and spin-echo spectroscopy. Finally, circular-state tweezer trapping exploiting the ${\mathrm{Sr}}^{+}$ core polarizability is quantified via measurements of the trap-induced light shift on the qubit. Our work opens routes for quantum simulations with circular Rydberg states of divalent atoms, exploiting the emergent toolbox associated with the optically active core ion.

Given a unitary evolution $U$ on a multipartite quantum system and an ensemble of initial states, how well can $U$ be simulated by local operations and classical communication (LOCC) on that ensemble? We answer this question by establishing a general, efficiently computable upper bound on the maximal LOCC simulation fidelity—what we call an “LOCC inequality.” We then apply our findings to the fundamental setting where $U$ implements a quantum Newtonian Hamiltonian over a gravitationally interacting system. Violation of our LOCC inequality can rule out the LOCCness of the underlying evolution, thereby establishing the nonclassicality of the gravitational dynamics, which can no longer be explained by a local classical field. As a prominent application of this scheme we study systems of quantum harmonic oscillators initialized in coherent states following a normal distribution and interacting via Newtonian gravity, and discuss a possible physical implementation with torsion pendula. One of our main technical contributions is the analytical calculation of the above LOCC inequality for this family of systems. As opposed to existing tests based on the detection of gravitationally mediated entanglement, our proposal works with coherent states alone, and thus it does not require the generation of largely delocalized states of motion nor the detection of entanglement, which is never created at any point in the process.

Cat qubits, for which logical $|0⟩$ and $|1⟩$ are coherent states $|\pm \alpha ⟩$ of a harmonic mode, offer a promising route towards quantum error correction. Using dissipation to our advantage so that photon pairs of the harmonic mode are exchanged with single photons of its environment, it is possible to stabilize the logical states and exponentially increase the bit-flip time of the cat qubit with the photon number $|\alpha {|}^2$. A large two-photon dissipation rate ${\kappa }_2$ ensures fast qubit manipulation and short error-correction cycles, which are instrumental to correct the remaining phase-flip errors in a repetition code of cat qubits. Here, we introduce and operate an autoparametric superconducting circuit that couples a mode containing the cat qubit to a lossy mode whose frequency is set at twice that of the cat mode. This passive coupling does not require a parametric pump, and it reaches a rate ${\kappa }_2/2\pi \approx 2\mathrm{MHz}$. With such a strong two-photon dissipation, bit-flip errors of the autoparametric cat qubit are prevented for a characteristic time up to 0.3 s with only a mild impact on phase-flip errors. In addition, we illustrate how the phase of a quantum superposition between $|\alpha ⟩$ and $|-\alpha ⟩$ can be arbitrarily changed by driving the harmonic mode while keeping the engineered dissipation active.

Quantum networks can enable various applications such as distributed quantum computing, long-distance quantum communication, and network-based quantum sensing with unprecedented performances. One of the most important building blocks for a quantum network is a photonic quantum memory which serves as the interface between the communication channel and the local functional unit. A programmable quantum memory which can process a large stream of flying qubits and fulfill the requirements of multiple core functions in a quantum network is still to be realized. Here we report a high-performance quantum memory which can simultaneously store 72 optical qubits carried by 144 spatially separated atomic ensembles and support up to a thousand consecutive write or read operations in a random access way, 2 orders of magnitude larger than the previous record. Because of the built-in programmability, this quantum memory can be adapted on demand for several functions. As example applications, we realize quantum queue, stack, and buffer which closely resemble the counterpart devices for classical information processing. We further demonstrate the storage and reshuffle of four entangled pairs of photonic pulses with probabilistic arrival time and arbitrary release order via the memory, which is an essential requirement for the realization of quantum repeaters and efficient routing in quantum networks. Realization of this multipurpose programmable quantum memory thus constitutes a key enabling building block for future large-scale fully functional quantum networks.

Given a renormalization scheme, we show how to formulate a tractable convex relaxation of the set of feasible local density matrices of a many-body quantum system. The relaxation is obtained by introducing a hierarchy of constraints between the reduced states of ever-growing sets of lattice sites. The coarse-graining maps of the underlying renormalization procedure serve to eliminate a vast number of those constraints, such that the remaining ones can be enforced with reasonable computational means. This process can be used to obtain rigorous lower bounds on the ground-state energy of arbitrary local Hamiltonians by performing a linear optimization over the resulting convex relaxation of reduced quantum states. The quality of the bounds crucially depends on the particular renormalization scheme, which must be tailored to the target Hamiltonian. We apply our method to 1D translation-invariant spin models, obtaining energy bounds comparable to those attained by optimizing over locally translation-invariant states of $n\gtrsim 100$ spins. Beyond this demonstration, the general method can be applied to a wide range of other problems, such as spin systems in higher spatial dimensions, electronic structure problems, and various other many-body optimization problems, such as entanglement and nonlocality detection.

Cooling the motion of trapped ions to near the quantum ground state is crucial for many applications in quantum information processing and quantum metrology. However, certain motional modes of trapped-ion crystals can be difficult to cool due to weak or zero interaction between the modes and the cooling radiation, typically laser beams. We overcome this challenge by coupling a mode that interacts weakly with cooling radiation to one that interacts strongly with cooling radiation using parametric modulation of the trapping potential, thereby enabling indirect cooling of the weakly interacting mode. In this way, we demonstrate near-ground-state cooling of motional modes with weak or zero cooling radiation interaction in multi-ion crystals of the same and mixed ion species, specifically ${}^9{\mathrm{Be}}^{+}\text{−}{}^9{\mathrm{Be}}^{+}$, ${}^9{\mathrm{Be}}^{+}\text{−}{}^{25}{\mathrm{Mg}}^{+}$, and ${}^9{\mathrm{Be}}^{+}\text{−}{}^{25}{\mathrm{Mg}}^{+}\text{−}{}^9{\mathrm{Be}}^{+}$ crystals. This approach can be generally applied to any Coulomb crystal where certain motional modes cannot be directly cooled efficiently, including crystals containing molecular ions, highly charged ions, charged fundamental particles, or charged macroscopic objects.

Bosonic encoding is an approach for quantum information processing, promising lower hardware overhead by encoding in the many levels of a harmonic-oscillator mode. Scaling to multiple modes requires weak interaction for independent control, yet strong interaction for fast control. Applying fast and efficient universal control on multiple modes remains an open problem. Surprisingly, we find that displacements conditioned on the state of a single-qubit ancilla coupled to multiple harmonic oscillators are sufficient for universal control. We present the conditional-no operation concept, which can be used to reduce the duration of entangling gates. Within this guiding concept, we develop the conditional-not displacement control method which enables fast generation and control of bosonic states in multimode systems weakly coupled to a single-ancilla qubit. Our method is fast despite the weak ancilla coupling. The weak coupling in turn allows for excellent separability and thus independent control. We demonstrate our control on a superconducting transmon qubit weakly coupled to a multimode superconducting cavity. We create both entangled and separable cat states in different modes of the multimode cavity, showing entangling operations at low crosstalk while maintaining independent control of the different modes. We show that the operation time is not limited by the inverse of the coupling rate, which is the typical timescale, and we exceed it by almost 2 orders of magnitude. We verify our results with an efficient method for measurement of the multimode characteristic function which employs our conditional-not displacement. Our results inspire a new approach toward general entangling operations and allow for fast and efficient multimode bosonic encoding and measurement.

Quantum error correction with erasure qubits promises significant advantages over standard error correction due to favorable thresholds for erasure errors. To realize this advantage in practice requires a qubit for which nearly all errors are such erasure errors, and the ability to check for erasure errors without dephasing the qubit. We demonstrate that a “dual-rail qubit” consisting of a pair of resonantly coupled transmons can form a highly coherent erasure qubit, where transmon $T_1$ errors are converted into erasure errors and residual dephasing is strongly suppressed, leading to millisecond-scale coherence within the qubit subspace. We show that single-qubit gates are limited primarily by erasure errors, with erasure probability $p_{\text{erasure}}=2.19(2)\times {10}^{-3}$ per gate while the residual errors are $\sim 40$ times lower. We further demonstrate midcircuit detection of erasure errors while introducing $<0.1\%$ dephasing error per check. Finally, we show that the suppression of transmon noise allows this dual-rail qubit to preserve high coherence over a broad tunable operating range, offering an improved capacity to avoid frequency collisions. This work establishes transmon-based dual-rail qubits as an attractive building block for hardware-efficient quantum error correction.

Quantum systems with engineered Hamiltonians can be used to study many-body physics problems to provide insights beyond the capabilities of classical computers. Semiconductor gate-defined quantum dot arrays have emerged as a versatile platform for realizing generalized Fermi-Hubbard physics, one of the richest playgrounds in condensed matter physics. In this work, we employ a germanium $4\times 2$ quantum dot array and show that the naturally occurring long-range Coulomb interaction can lead to exciton formation and transport. We tune the quantum dot ladder into two capacitively coupled channels and exploit Coulomb drag to probe the binding of electrons and holes. Specifically, we shuttle an electron through one leg of the ladder and observe that a hole is dragged along in the second leg under the right conditions. This corresponds to a transition from single-electron transport in one leg to exciton transport along the ladder. Our work paves the way for the study of excitonic states of matter in quantum dot arrays.

Ramsey interferometry is a widely used tool for precisely measuring transition frequencies between two energy levels of a quantum system, with applications in time keeping, precision spectroscopy, quantum optics, and quantum information. Often, the coherence time of the quantum system surpasses the one of the oscillator probing the system, thereby limiting the interrogation time and associated spectral resolution. Correlation spectroscopy overcomes this limitation by probing two quantum systems with the same noisy oscillator for a measurement of their transition frequency difference; this technique has enabled very precise comparisons of atomic clocks. Here, we extend correlation spectroscopy to the case of multiple quantum systems undergoing strong correlated dephasing. We model Ramsey correlation spectroscopy with $N$ particles as a multiparameter phase estimation problem and demonstrate that multiparticle correlations can assist in reducing the measurement uncertainties even in the absence of entanglement. We derive precision limits and optimal sensing techniques for this problem and compare the performance of probe states and measurement with and without entanglement. Using one- and two-dimensional ion Coulomb crystals with up to 91 qubits, we experimentally demonstrate the advantage of measuring multiparticle correlations for reducing phase uncertainties and apply correlation spectroscopy to measure ion-ion distances, transition frequency shifts, laser-ion detunings, and path-length fluctuations. Our method can be straightforwardly implemented in experimental setups with globally coherent qubit control and qubit-resolved single-shot readout and is, thus, applicable to other physical systems such as neutral atoms in tweezer arrays.

Shortcuts to adiabaticity provide fast protocols for quantum state preparation in which the use of auxiliary counterdiabatic controls circumvents the requirement of slow driving in adiabatic strategies. While their development is well established in simple systems, their engineering and implementation are challenging in many-body quantum systems with many degrees of freedom. We show that the equation for the counterdiabatic term—equivalently, the adiabatic gauge potential—is solved by introducing a Krylov basis. The Krylov basis spans the minimal operator subspace in which the dynamics unfolds and provides an efficient way to construct the counterdiabatic term. We apply our strategy to paradigmatic single- and many-particle models. The properties of the counterdiabatic term are reflected in the Lanczos coefficients obtained in the course of the construction of the Krylov basis by an algorithmic method. We examine how the expansion in the Krylov basis incorporates many-body interactions in the counterdiabatic term.

Strong mutual interaction which correlates elementary excitations of quantum matter plays a key role in a range of emergent phenomena, from binding and condensation to quantum thermalization and many-body localization. Here, we employ a Rydberg quantum simulator to experimentally demonstrate strongly correlated spin transport in anisotropic Heisenberg magnets, where the magnon-magnon interaction can be tuned 2 orders of magnitude larger than the magnon hopping strength. In our approach, the motion of magnons is controlled by an induced spin-exchange interaction through far off-resonant driving, which enables coherent transport of a single Rydberg excitation across a chain of ground-state atoms. As the most prominent signature of a giant anisotropy, we show that nearby Rydberg excitations form distinct types of magnon-bound states, where a tightly bound pair exhibits frozen dynamics in a fragmented Hilbert space, while a loosely bound pair propagates and establishes correlations beyond a single lattice site. Our scheme complements studies using resonant dipole-dipole interactions between Rydberg states and opens the door to exploring quantum thermodynamics with ultrastrong interactions and kinetic constraints.

A candidate application for quantum computers is to simulate the low-temperature properties of quantum systems. For this task, there is a well-studied quantum algorithm that performs quantum phase estimation on an initial trial state that has a non-negligible overlap with a low-energy state. However, it is notoriously hard to give theoretical guarantees that such a trial state can be prepared efficiently. Moreover, the heuristic proposals that are currently available, such as with adiabatic state preparation, appear insufficient in practical cases. This paper shows that, for most random sparse Hamiltonians, the maximally mixed state is a sufficiently good trial state, and phase estimation efficiently prepares states with energy arbitrarily close to the ground energy. Furthermore, any low-energy state must have non-negligible quantum circuit complexity, suggesting that low-energy states are classically nontrivial and phase estimation is the optimal method for preparing such states (up to polynomial factors). These statements hold for two models of random Hamiltonians: (i) a sum of random signed Pauli strings and (ii) a random signed $d$-sparse Hamiltonian. The main technical argument is based on some new results in nonasymptotic random matrix theory. In particular, a refined concentration bound for the spectral density is required to obtain complexity guarantees for these random Hamiltonians.

We generalize the notion of quantum state designs to infinite-dimensional spaces. We first prove that, under the definition of continuous-variable (CV) state $t$-designs from [Blume-Kohout et al., Commun. Math. Phys. 326, 755 (2014)], no state designs exist for $t\ge 2$. Similarly, we prove that no CV unitary $t$-designs exist for $t\ge 2$. We propose an alternative definition for CV state designs, which we call rigged $t$-designs, and provide explicit constructions for $t=2$. As an application of rigged designs, we develop a design-based shadow-tomography protocol for CV states. Using energy-constrained versions of rigged designs, we define an average fidelity for CV quantum channels and relate this fidelity to the CV entanglement fidelity. As an additional result of independent interest, we establish a connection between torus 2-designs and complete sets of mutually unbiased bases.

We experimentally demonstrate a microwave photon-multiplication scheme which combines the advantages of a single-photon detector and a power meter by multiplying the incoming photon number by an integer factor. Our first experimental implementation achieves an $n=3$-fold multiplication with 0.69 efficiency in a 116 MHz bandwidth up to an input photon rate of 400 MHz. It loses phase information but does not require any dead time or time binning. We expect an optimized device cascading such multipliers to achieve number-resolving measurement of itinerant photons with low dark count, which would offer new possibilities in a wide range of quantum-sensing and quantum-computing applications.