Quantum Information

Understanding quantum noise is an essential step towards building practical quantum information processing systems. Pauli noise is a useful model widely applied in quantum benchmarking, quantum error mitigation, and quantum error correction. Despite previous research, the problem of how to learn a Pauli noise model self-consistently, completely, and efficiently has remained open. In this talk, I will introduce a framework of gate-set Pauli noise learning that aims at addressing this problem. The framework treats initialization, measurement, and a set of quantum gates to suffer from unknown Pauli noise channels, which are allowed to have customized locality constraints. The goal is to learn all the Pauli noise channels using only those noisy operations. I will first introduce a theory on the “learnability” of Pauli noise model, i.e., what information is fundamentally identifiable within the model and what is not. This is established using tools from algebraic graph theory and ideas from gate set tomography; I will then discuss a sample-efficient procedure to learn all learnable information of a Paul noise model to any desired precision; Finally, I will demonstrate how to apply our theoretic framework for concrete practical gate set and noise assumptions, and discuss the potential impact on quantum error mitigation and other applications.

Abstract: Randomness is a powerful resource for information-processing applications. For example, classical randomness is essential for modern information security and underpins many cryptographic schemes. Similarly, quantum randomness can protect quantum information against noise or eavesdroppers who wish to access or manipulate that information. These observations raise a set of related questions: How quickly and efficiently can we generate quantum randomness? How much quantum randomness is necessary for a given task? What can we use quantum randomness for? In this talk, I address these questions using all-to-all Brownian circuits, a family of random quantum circuits for which exact results can often be obtained via mean-field theory. I will first demonstrate that all-to-all Brownian circuits form k-designs in a time that scales linearly with k. I will then discuss how these circuits can be applied to study Heisenberg-limited metrology and quantum advantage. In particular, I will discuss a time-reversal protocol that can achieve Heisenberg-limited precision in cavity QED and trapped ion setups; I will also discuss the application of these circuits to studying classical spoofing algorithms for the linear cross-entropy benchmark, a popular measure of quantum advantage.

Random unitaries form the backbone of numerous components of quantum technologies, and serve as indispensable toy models for complex processes in quantum many-body physics. In all of these applications, a crucial consideration is in what circuit depth a random unitary can be generated. I will present recent work, in which we show that local quantum circuits can form random unitaries in exponentially lower circuit depths than previously thought. We prove that random quantum circuits on any geometry, including a 1D line, can form approximate unitary designs over n qubits in log n depth. In a similar manner, we construct pseudorandom unitaries (PRUs) in 1D circuits in poly log n depth, and in all-to-all-connected circuits in poly log log n depth. These shallow quantum circuits have low complexity and create only short-range entanglement, yet are indistinguishable from unitaries with exponential complexity. Applications of our results include proving that classical shadows with 1D log-depth Clifford circuits are as powerful as those with deep circuits, demonstrating superpolynomial quantum advantage in learning low-complexity physical systems, and establishing quantum hardness for recognizing phases of matter with topological order.

I will present a universal numerical tool for identifying optimal adaptive metrological protocols in the presence of both uncorrelated and correlated noise [arXiv:2403.04854]. Leveraging a novel tensor network decomposition of quantum combs, the algorithm demonstrates efficiency even with a large number of channel uses (N=50). In the second part of the talk, I will explore the generalization of existing metrological upper bounds [Nat. Com. 3, 1063 (2012), PRL 131(9), 090801 (2023)] for correlated noise scenarios [arXiv:2410.01881].

Static patch holography is a conjectured duality between the static patch of an observer in de Sitter spacetime and a quantum theory defined on its (stretched) cosmological horizon. We illustrate from entanglement wedge reconstruction how a closed and connected de Sitter spacetime can emerge in this framework from the entanglement between the two holographic screens of two antipodal observers. In holographic spacetimes, a direct scattering in the bulk may not have a local boundary analog, imposing the existence of O(1/G) mutual information on the boundary. This statement is formalized by the connected wedge theorem, which is expected to hold beyond the AdS/CFT correspondence from which it originates. We consider scatterings in the static patch of an observer. We argue that for static patch holography to be consistent with the connected wedge theorem, causality on the stretched horizon should be induced from null infinity. In particular, signals propagating in the static patch are associated with fictitious local operators at null infinity. We present a sketch of proof of the connected wedge theorem in asymptotically de Sitter spacetime using induced causality.

Entanglement in quantum many-body systems is typically fragile to interactions with the environment. Generic unital quantum channels, for example, have the maximally mixed state with no entanglement as their unique steady state. However, we find that for a unital quantum channel that is `strongly symmetric', i.e. it preserves a global on-site symmetry, the maximally mixed steady state in certain symmetry sectors can be highly entangled. For a given symmetry, we analyze the entanglement and correlations of the maximally mixed state in the invariant sector (MMIS), and show that the entanglement of formation and distillation are exactly computable and equal for any bipartition. For all Abelian symmetries, the MMIS is separable, and for all non-Abelian symmetries, the MMIS is entangled. Remarkably, for non-Abelian continuous symmetries described by compact semisimple Lie groups (e.g. SU(2)), the bipartite entanglement of formation for the MMIS scales logarithmically ∼logN with the number of qudits N.