Quantum Foundations

 

Tsirelson’s problem involves two agents, Alice and Bob, who apply measurements on the same quantum system, K. It asks whether commutation, i.e., independence of whether Alice or Bob measures first, is sufficient to conclude that Alice and Bob’s measurements can be factorised so that they act non-trivially only on distinct subsystems of K. In this talk, I will present a “fully quantum generalisation” of this problem, where Alice and Bob’s measurements are replaced by operations on K that may depend on additional quantum inputs and produce quantum outputs. As for Tsirelson’s original problem, it turns out that commutation indeed implies factorisation, provided that all relevant systems are finite-dimensional.

This is joint work with Ramona Wolf; preprint available at arXiv:2308.05792.

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 Zoom link https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99031410183?pwd=MzVoQXpPSll6bFp1b1g3U2J4U21rZz09

Activation of Bell nonlocality refers to the phenomenon where some entangled mixed states that admit a local hidden variable model in the standard Bell scenario nevertheless reveal their nonlocal nature in more exotic measurement scenarios. It has recently been shown that by broadcasting the subsystems of a bipartite quantum state, one can activate Bell nonlocality and significantly improve noise tolerance bounds for device-independent and semi-device-independent entanglement certification, with a single copy of the state and local measurements. In this talk I will review the state of the art on activation of nonlocality and existence of local hidden variable models, introduce the broadcasting technique and outline several interesting results and research directions.

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Zoom link  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/91214624839?pwd=dXNUOERLMldScjczemlaSUhFbFNWQT09

A number of no-go theorems suggest that theories upholding both unitarity and relativity must deny that events are absolute. I'll show how quantum causal influences allow us to articulate an attractive conception of relational events. This will lead us towards a precise, observer-independent reformulation of quantum theory, in which relational events emerge from causation.

Zoom link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/98649944363?pwd=Y25NOUROelY2ZmFpVWhTZFErV2MwUT09

In 2020 our Oxford-based Quantinuum team performed Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) on IBM quantum hardware [1, 2].  Key to having been able to achieve what is conceived as a heavily data-driven task, is the observation that quantum theory and natural language are governed by much of the same compositional structure -- a.k.a. tensor structure.  

 

Hence our language model is in a sense quantum-native, and we provide an analogy with simulation of quantum systems in terms of algorithmic speed-up [forthcoming].  Meanwhile we have made all our software available open-source, and with support [github.com/CQCL/lambeq].    

 

The compositional match between natural language and quantum extends to other domains than language, and argue that a new generation of AI can emerge when fully pushing this analogy, while exploiting the completeness of categorical quantum mechanics / ZX-calculus [3, 4, 5] for novel reasoning purposes that go hand-in-hand with modern machine learning.

 

[1]     B. Coecke, G. De Felice, K. Meichanetzidis and A. Toumi (2020) Foundations for Near-Term Quantum Natural Language Processing.  https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.03755

[2]     R. Lorenz, A. Pearson, K. Meichanetzidis, D. Kartsaklis and B. Coecke (2020) QNLP in Practice: Running Compositional Models of Meaning on a Quantum Computer.  https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12846

[3]     B. Coecke and A. Kissinger (2017) Picturing Quantum Processes. A first course on quantum theory and diagrammatic reasoning.  Cambridge University Press.

[4]     B. Coecke, D. Horsman, A. Kissinger and Q. Wang (2021) Kindergarten quantum mechanics graduates (...or how I learned to stop gluing LEGO together and love the ZX-calculus).  https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.10984

[5]     B. Coecke and S. Gogioso (2022) Quantum in Pictures.  Quantinuum, 2023.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/92333285960?pwd=MlpJSklmMlVlUlRTTWhsNjc2T2Y4QT09

Recently, Akers et al. proposed a non-isometric holographic map from the interior of a black hole to its exterior. Within this model, we study properties of the black hole S-matrix, which are in principle accessible to observers who stay outside the black hole. Specifically, we investigate a scenario in which an infalling agent interacts with radiation both outside and inside the black hole. Because the holographic map involves postselection, the unitarity of the S-matrix is not guaranteed in this scenario, but we find that unitarity is satisfied to very high precision if suitable conditions are met. If the internal black hole dynamics is described by a pseudorandom unitary transformation, and if the operations performed by the infaller have computational complexity scaling polynomially with the black hole entropy, then the S-matrix is unitary up to corrections that are superpolynomially small in the black hole entropy. Furthermore, while in principle quantum computation assisted by postselection can be very powerful, we find under similar assumptions that the S-matrix of an evaporating black hole has polynomial computational complexity.

The JLMS formula is a cornerstone in our understanding of bulk reconstruction in holographic theories of quantum gravity, best interpreted as a quantum error-correcting code. Moreover, recent work has highlighted the importance of understanding holography as an approximate and perhaps non-isometric code. In this work, we construct an enlarged code subspace for the bulk theory that contains multiple non-perturbatively different background geometries. In such a large holographic code, we carefully derive an approximate version of the JLMS formula from an approximate FLM formula for a class of nice states. We do not assume that the code is isometric, but interestingly find that approximate FLM forces the code to be approximately isometric. Furthermore, we show that the bulk modular Hamiltonian of the entanglement wedge makes important contributions to the JLMS formula and cannot in general be neglected even when the bulk state is semiclassical. Nevertheless, when acting on states with the same background geometry, we find that the modular flow is well approximated by the area flow which takes the geometric form of a boundary-condition-preserving kink transform. We also generalize the results to higher derivative gravity, where area is replaced by the geometric entropy. We conjecture that a Lorentzian definition of the geometric entropy is equivalent to its original, Euclidean definition, and we verify this conjecture in a dilaton theory with higher derivative couplings. Thus we find that the flow generated by the geometric entropy takes the universal form of a boundary-condition-preserving kink transform.

We construct approximately local observables, or "overlapping qubits", using non-isometric maps and show that processes in local effective theories can be spoofed with a quantum system with fewer degrees of freedom, similar to our expectation in holography. Furthermore, the spoofed system naturally deviates from an actual local theory in ways that can be identified with features in quantum gravity. For a concrete example, we construct two MERA toy models of de Sitter space-time and explain how the exponential expansion in global de Sitter can be spoofed with many fewer quantum degrees of freedom and that local physics may be approximately preserved for an exceedingly long time before breaking down. Conceptually, we comment on how approximate overlapping qubits connect Hilbert space dimension verification, degree-of-freedom counting in black holes and holography, approximate locality in quantum gravity, non-isometric codes, and circuit complexity.

In this paper, we explore the possibility of building a quantum memory that is robust to thermal noise using large N matrix quantum mechanics models. First, we investigate the gauged SU(N) matrix harmonic oscillator and different ways to encode quantum information in it. By calculating the mutual information between the system and a reference which purifies the encoded information, we identify a transition temperature, Tc, below which the encoded quantum information is protected from thermal noise for a memory time scaling as N^2. Conversely, for temperatures higher than T_c, the information is quickly destroyed by thermal noise. Second, we relax the requirement of gauge invariance and study a matrix harmonic oscillator model with only global symmetry. Finally, we further relax even the symmetry requirement and propose a model that consists of a large number N^2 of qubits, with interactions derived from an approximate SU(N) symmetry. In both ungauged models, we find that the effects of gauging can be mimicked using an energy penalty to give a similar result for the memory time. The final qubit model also has the potential to be realized in the laboratory.

The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is a simple toy model of holography that has seen widespread study in the area of quantum gravity. It is particularly notable for its feasibility of simulation on near-term quantum devices. Recently, Swingle et al. introduced a sparsified version of the SYK model and analyzed its holographic properties, which are remarkably robust to deletion of Majorana interaction terms. Here we analyze its spectral and quantum chaotic properties as they pertain to holography as well as how they scale with sparsity and system size through large scale numerics. We identify at least two transition points at which features of chaos and holography are lost as the model is sparsified, and above which all important features are preserved, which may serve as guidelines for future experiments to simulate quantum gravity. Additionally, we apply these analyses to the SYK model that was recently experimentally simulated on the Google Sycamore quantum processor, which itself was a highly sparsified SYK model obtained through a machine learning algorithm incorporating mutual information signatures of a traversable wormhole.