Training Programs (TEOSP)

In the panel discussion, each panelist will showcase examples of well-written papers and share one essential "do" and one important "don't" for crafting effective scientific papers. The session will include an open Q&A segment to encourage audience engagement.

Area metrics define generalized geometric backgrounds to describe spacetime. They are suggested at various places in classical field theory and arise within different approaches to quantum gravity. On these grounds, after introducing the notion of an area metric, I will consider covariant area-metric actions to second order in fluctuations and derivatives. I will then show how these give rise to effective length-metric actions with a distinct nonlocal Weyl-curvature squared term beyond general relativity. Finally, I will point out possible implications and routes for phenomenology.

Non-local operators, supported on submanifolds of spacetime, often encode fascinating physical insights about a theory and can serve as order parameters for phase transitions. In this talk, we will explore various aspects of 1/2​ BPS surface operators in N=4 super Yang-Mills. Specifically, I will show how supergravity computes exactly the planar limit of certain correlation functions of surface operators, even though they receive nontrivial quantum corrections. In particular, we will compute correlation functions with Chiral Primary Operators by localizing N = 4 super Yang-Mills on S^4 to a deformed version of 2d Yang-Mills on S^2. These correlation functions, which have a finite number of quantum corrections, can also be computed perturbatively in four dimensions. I will show the exact agreement between these approaches and the corresponding supergravity result. This talk is based on 2406.08541, work in collaboration with Changha Choi and Jaume Gomis.

As part of PI’s ongoing initiative aimed at enhancing the skills of our graduate students and post docs, we're introducing a training program designed to equip them with practical insights for delivering compelling non-technical presentations. The sessions will be facilitated by PI's training and outreach personnel.

It is commonly believed that logical states of quantum error-correcting codes have to be highly entangled such that codes capable of correcting more errors require more entanglement to encode a qubit. Here we show that this belief may or may not be true depending on a particular code. To this end, we characterize a tradeoff between the code distance d quantifying the number of correctable errors, and geometric entanglement of logical states quantifying their maximal overlap with product states or more general "topologically trivial" states. The maximum overlap is shown to be exponentially small in d for three families of codes: (1) low-density parity check (LDPC) codes with commuting check operators, (2) stabilizer codes, and (3) codes with a constant encoding rate. Equivalently, the geometric entanglement of any logical state of these codes grows at least linearly with d. On the opposite side, we also show that this distance-entanglement tradeoff does not hold in general. For any constant d and k (number of logical qubits), we show there exists a family of codes such that the geometric entanglement of some logical states approaches zero in the limit of large code length. This work was done by the collaboration with Sergey Bravyi, Zhi Li, and Beni Yoshida. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01332)

The dynamics of closed quantum systems undergoing unitary processes has been well studied, leading to notions of measures for the expressive power of parameterized quantum circuits, relative to the unique, maximally expressive, average behaviour of ensembles of unitaries. Such unitary expressivity measures have further been linked to concentration phenomena known as barren plateaus. However, existing quantum hardware are not isolated from their noisy environment, and such non-unitary dynamics must therefore be described by more general trace-preserving operations. To account for hardware noise, we propose several, non-unique measures of expressivity for quantum channels and study their properties, highlighting how average non-unitary channels differ from average unitary channels. In the limit of large composite system and environments, average noisy quantum channels are shown to be maximally globally depolarizing. Furthermore, we rigorously prove that highly-expressive parameterized quantum channels will suffer from barren plateaus, thus generalizing explanations of noise-induced phenomena. We complement our analytical findings with numerical experiments that showcase that, in certain situations, noise can increase the expressivity of parametrized quantum circuits.

Quantum entanglement measures of many-body states have been increasingly useful to characterize phases of matter. Here we explore the surprising connection between symmetry-protected topology (SPT) and separability of their boundary mixed states. More specifically, we consider lattice systems in d space dimensions with anomalous symmetry G, where the anomaly is characterized by a bulk SPT invariant in the group cohomology Hd+2(G,U(1)). We show that any mixed state ρ that is strongly symmetric under G, in the sense that G ρ ∝ ρ, is necessarily (d+2)-nonseparable, i.e. is not the mixture of tensor products of d+2 states in the Hilbert space. Furthermore, such states cannot be prepared from any (d+2)-separable states using finite-depth local quantum channels, so the non-separability is long-ranged in nature. The anomaly-nonseparability connection also allows us to generate simple examples of mixed states with nontrivial multi-partite entanglement.

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In this work, drawing inspiration from the type of noise present in real hardware, we study the output distribution of random quantum circuits under practical non-unital noise sources with constant noise rates. We show that even in the presence of unital sources like the depolarizing channel, the distribution, under the combined noise
channel, never resembles a maximally entropic distribution at any depth. To show this, we prove that the output distribution of such circuits never anticoncentrates — meaning it is never too "flat" — regardless of the depth of the circuit. This is in stark contrast to the behavior of noiseless random quantum circuits or those with only unital noise, both
of which anticoncentrate at sufficiently large depths. As consequences, our results have interesting algorithmic implications on both the hardness and easiness of noisy random circuit sampling, since anticoncentration is a critical property exploited by both state-of-the-art classical hardness and easiness results. This talk is based on arXiv:2306.16659.

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Recently, there has been much interest in black hole echoes, based on the idea that there may be some mechanism (e.g., from quantum gravity) that waves/fields falling into a black hole could partially reflect off of an interface before reaching the horizon. There does not seem to be a good understanding of how to properly model a reflecting surface in numerical relativity, as the vast majority of the literature avoids the implementation of artificial boundaries, or applies transmitting boundary conditions. Here, we present a framework for reflecting a scalar field in a fully dynamical spherically symmetric spacetime, and implement it numerically. We study the evolution of a wave packet in this situation and its numerical convergence, including when the location of a reflecting boundary is very close to the horizon of a black hole. This opens the door to model exotic near-horizon physics within full numerical relativity.