quantum-physics
Jonathan Oppenheim, from University College London, critically evaluates an AI-generated criterion for relativistic covariance in nonlinear quantum field theory, demonstrating its fundamental flaw in detecting Hamiltonian locality rather than quantum state nonlinearity. The analysis reaffirms the Gisin-Polchinski theorem and highlights limitations of current advanced AI models in deep conceptual understanding and error detection in foundational physics.
State-of-the-art superconducting qubits rely on a limited set of thin-film materials. Expanding their materials palette can improve performance, extend operating regimes, and introduce new functionalities, but conventional thin-film fabrication hinders systematic exploration of new material combinations. Van der Waals (vdW) materials offer a highly modular crystalline platform that facilitates such exploration while enabling gate-tunability, higher-temperature operation, and compact qubit geometries. Yet it remains unknown whether a fully vdW superconducting qubit can support quantum coherence and what mechanisms dominate loss at both low and elevated temperatures in such a device. Here we demonstrate quantum-coherent merged-element transmons made entirely from vdW Josephson junctions. These first-generation, fully crystalline qubits achieve microsecond lifetimes in an ultra-compact footprint without external shunt capacitors. Energy relaxation measurements, together with microwave characterization of vdW capacitors, point to dielectric loss as the dominant relaxation channel up to hundreds of millikelvin. These results establish vdW materials as a viable platform for compact superconducting quantum devices.
Typical stabilizer codes aim to solve the general problem of fault-tolerance without regard for the structure of a specific system. By incorporating a broader representation-theoretic perspective, we provide a generalized framework that allows the code designer to take this structure into account. For any representation of a finite group, we produce a quantum code with a code space invariant under the group action, providing passive error mitigation against errors belonging to the image of the representation. Furthermore, errors outside this scope are detected and diagnosed by performing a projective measurement onto the isotypic components corresponding to irreducible representations of the chosen group, effectively generalizing syndrome extraction to symmetry-resolved quantum measurements. We show that all stabilizer codes are a special case of this construction, including qudit stabilizer codes, and show that there is a natural one logical qubit code associated to the dihedral group. Thus we provide a unifying framework for existing codes while simultaneously facilitating symmetry-aware codes tailored to specific systems.
When light propagates through complex media, its output spatial distribution is highly sensitive to its wavelength. This fundamentally limits the bandwidth of applications ranging from imaging to communication. Here, we demonstrate analytically and numerically that the spatial correlations of hyper-entangled photon pairs, simultaneously entangled spatially and spectrally, remain stable across a broad bandwidth: The chromatic modal dispersion experienced by one photon is canceled to first order by its spectrally anti-correlated twin, defining a "two-photon bandwidth" that can far exceed its classical counterpart. We illustrate this modal dispersion cancellation in multimode fibers, thin diffusers and blazed gratings, and demonstrate its utility for broadband wavefront shaping of quantum states. These findings advance our fundamental understanding of quantum light in complex media with applications in quantum imaging, communication, and sensing.
Logical qubits encoded in quantum error correcting codes can exhibit non-Markovian dynamical evolution, even when the underlying physical noise is Markovian. To understand this emergent non-Markovianity, we define a Markovianity condition appropriate to logical gate operations, and study it by relating logical operations to their physical implementation (operations on the data qubits into which the logical qubit is encoded). We apply our analysis to small quantum codes, and show that they exhibit non-Markovian dynamics even for very simple physical noise models. We show that non-Markovianity can emerge from Markovian physical operations if (and only if) the physical qubits are not necessarily returned to the code subspace after every round of QEC. In this situation, the syndrome qubits can act as a memory, mediating time correlations and enabling violation of the Markov condition. We quantify the emergent non-Markovianity in simple examples, and propose sufficient conditions for reliable use of gate-based characterization techniques like gate set tomography in early fault-tolerant quantum devices.
Google DeepMind and Google Quantum AI introduce AlphaQubit 2 (AQ2), a neural decoder achieving near-optimal accuracy for topological quantum codes, including the surface code and the challenging color code, at large scales. Its real-time variant, AQ2-RT, processes error syndromes at sub-microsecond speeds on commercial hardware and demonstrates effectiveness on experimental data from the 105-qubit Willow chip.
Processes with indefinite causal order can arise when quantum theory is locally valid. Here, we identify an information-theoretic principle, termed parity erasure, that completely characterizes such processes. Our characterization does not rely on the formalism of quantum theory itself, but instead is derived from a set of axioms for general operational probabilistic theories, and thus holds also for a large class of theories beyond quantum theory. This informational approach reveals a fundamental property of information exchange in scenarios with indefinite causal structure.
Time, space and entanglement are the main characters in this work. Their nature is still a great mystery in physics and we study here the possibility that these three phenomena are closely connected, showing how entanglement can be at the basis of the emergence of time and space within closed quantum systems. We revisit and extend the Page and Wootters theory that was originally introduced in order to describe the emergence of time through entanglement between subsystems in a globally static, quantum Universe. In the book, after providing a complete review of the salient aspects of the theory, we establish a connection with recent research on the foundations of statistical mechanics and we propose a new understanding of the thermalization process. Furthermore, we generalize the framework in order describe the spatial degree of freedom and we provide a model of 3+1 dimensional, quantum spacetime emerging from entanglement among different subsystems in a globally "timeless" and "positionless" Universe. Finally, via the Page and Wootters theory, the evolution of quantum clocks within a gravitational field is treated and a time dilation effect is obtained in agreement with the Schwarzschild solution.
Programmability is a unifying paradigm for enacting families of quantum transformations via fixed processors and program states, with a fundamental role and broad impact in quantum computation and control. While there has been a shift from viewing open systems solely as a source of error to treating them as a computational resource, their programmability remains largely unexplored. In this work, we develop a framework that characterizes and quantifies the programmability of Lindbladian semigroups by combining physically implementable retrieval maps with time varying program states. Within this framework, we identify quantum programmable classes enabled by symmetry and stochastic structure, including covariant semigroups and fully dissipative Pauli Lindbladians with finite program dimension. We further provide a necessary condition for physical programmability that rules out coherent generators and typical dissipators generating amplitude damping. For such nonphysically programmable cases, we construct explicit protocols with finite resources. Finally, we introduce an operational programming cost, defined via the number of samples required to program the Lindbladian, and establish its core structural properties, such as continuity and faithfulness. These results provide a notion of programming cost for Lindbladians, bridge programmable channel theory and open system dynamics, and yield symmetry driven compression schemes and actionable resource estimates for semigroup simulation and control in noisy quantum technologies.
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In this work, we develop a protocol for learning a time-independent Lindblad model for operations that can be applied repeatedly on a quantum computer. The protocol is highly scalable for models with local interactions and is in principle insensitive to state-preparation errors. At its core, the protocol forms a linear system of equations for the model parameters in terms of a set of observable values and their gradients. The required gradient information is obtained by fitting time-series data with sums of exponentially damped sinusoids and differentiating those curves. We develop a robust curve-fitting procedure that finds the most parsimonious representation of the data up to shot noise. We demonstrate the approach by learning the Lindbladian for a full layer of gates on a 156-qubit superconducting quantum processor, providing the first learning experiment of this kind. We study the effects of state-preparation and measurement errors and limitations on the operations that can be learned. For improved performance under readout errors, we propose an optional fine-tuning strategy that improves the fit between the time-evolved model and the measured data.
High-fidelity fluid simulations are central to understanding transport phenomena, yet resolving large or geometrically complex systems remains computationally prohibitive with existing methods. Here we introduce a tensor-network formulation of the lattice Boltzmann method based on matrix product states (MPS), commonly known as a quantum-inspired approach, enabling compressed representations of structured flow fields with inherent error control. We demonstrate the generality of the method on flows through structured media and complex vascular geometries, establishing for the first time that tensor-network techniques can efficiently resolve fluid dynamics in complex, irregular domains. We show that in the presence of translational or approximate symmetries of the geometry, fluid states exhibit low effective complexity in MPS form, yielding compression ratios exceeding two orders of magnitude while preserving physical structure and dynamical fidelity. This reduction enables systematic numerical exploration of regimes that were previously intractable. Our results position tensor networks as a scalable paradigm for continuum mechanics.
Compiling shallow and accurate quantum circuits for Hamiltonian simulation remains challenging due to hardware constraints and the combinatorial complexity of minimizing gate count and circuit depth. Existing optimization method pipelines rely on hand-engineered classical heuristics, which cannot learn input-dependent structure and therefore miss substantial opportunities for circuit reduction. We introduce \textbf{F2}, an offline reinforcement learning framework that exploits free-fermionic structure to efficiently compile Trotter-based Hamiltonian simulation circuits. F2 provides (i) a reinforcement-learning environment over classically simulatable free-fermionic subroutines, (ii) architectural and objective-level inductive biases that stabilize long-horizon value learning, and (iii) a reversible synthetic-trajectory generation mechanism that consistently yields abundant, guaranteed-successful offline data. Across benchmarks spanning lattice models, protein fragments, and crystalline materials (12-222 qubits), F2 reduces gate count by 47\% and depth by 38\% on average relative to strong baselines (Qiskit, Cirq/OpenFermion) while maintaining average errors of 10710^{-7}. These results show that aligning deep reinforcement learning with the algebraic structure of quantum dynamics enables substantial improvements in circuit synthesis, suggesting a promising direction for scalable, learning-based quantum compilation
Hybrid quantum systems harness the distinct advantages of different physical platforms, yet their integration is not always trivial due to potential incompatibilities in operational principles. Here, we theoretically propose and demonstrate a scheme for generating non-Gaussian mechanical states using a strongly driven hybrid system that combines cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) and cavity optomechanics. Our protocol prepares a non-Gaussian cavity state in the dispersive regime of cavity QED and subsequently transfers it to a mechanical oscillator using the optomechanical interaction enhanced by a coherent cavity drive. While non-Gaussian cavity state control in cavity QED is well established in the dispersive regime, its behavior under strong cavity drive, essential for cavity optomechanics, remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we develop an efficient simulation framework to model cavity QED dynamics in the high-photon-number regime. We show that a strong cavity drive can coherently displace the cavity state with minimal perturbations, effectively decoupling it from the qubit. The resulting large coherent cavity field enhances the optomechanical coupling strength, enabling high-fidelity transfer of non-Gaussian cavity states to the mechanical mode. These results reveal new dynamical features of driven cavity QED and open a pathway toward realizing non-Gaussian mechanical quantum memories and sensors.
Quantum optimisation is emerging as a promising approach alongside classical heuristics and specialised hardware, yet its performance is often difficult to assess fairly. Traditional benchmarking methods, rooted in digital complexity theory, do not directly capture the continuous dynamics, probabilistic outcomes, and workflow overheads of quantum and hybrid systems. This paper proposes principles and protocols for fair benchmarking of quantum optimisation, emphasising end-to-end workflows, transparency in tuning and reporting, problem diversity, and avoidance of speculative claims. By extending lessons from classical benchmarking and incorporating application-driven and energy-aware metrics, we outline a framework that enables practitioners to evaluate quantum methods responsibly, ensuring reproducibility, comparability, and trust in reported results.
Quantum point contacts (QPC) are a key instrument in investigating the physics of edge excitations in the quantum Hall effect. However, at not-so-high bias voltage values, the predictions of the conventional point QPC model often deviate from the experimental data both in the integer and (more prominently) in the fractional quantum Hall regime. One of the possible explanations for such behaviors is the dependence of the tunneling between the edges on energy, an effect not present in the conventional model. Here we introduce two models that take QPC spatial extension into account: wide-QPC model that accounts for the distance along which the edges are in contact; long-QPC model accounts for the fact that the tunneling amplitude originates from a finite bulk gap and a finite distance between the two edges. We investigate the predictions of these two models in the integer quantum Hall regime for the energy dependence of the tunneling amplitude. We find that these two models predict opposite dependences: the amplitude decreasing or increasing away from the Fermi level. We thus elucidate the effect of the QPC geometry on the energy dependence of the tunneling amplitude and investigate its implications for transport observables.
To understand the intricate exchange between electrons of different bands in strongly correlated materials, it is essential to treat multi-orbital models accurately. For this purpose, dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) provides an established framework, whose scope crucially hinges on the availability of efficient quantum impurity solvers. Here we present a real-frequency impurity solver based on neural quantum states (NQS) combined with an operator-Lanczos construction. NQS are an asymptotically unbiased variational ground-state ansatz that employs neural networks to capture long-range correlations on complicated graph structures. We leverage this ability to solve multi-orbital impurity problems using a systematically improvable Segmented Commutator Operator-Lanczos (SCOL) construction. Our benchmarks on both the single-orbital Anderson model and the multi-orbital Hubbard-Kanamori impurity Hamiltonian reveal excellent ground-state precision and the capacity to accurately resolve zero temperature spectral functions and self-energies. These results open avenues for extending DMFT to more challenging problems.
We establish that the exact quantum dynamics of a Brownian particle in the Caldeira-Leggett model can be mapped, at any temperature, onto a classical, non-Markovian stochastic process in phase space. Starting from a correlated thermal equilibrium state between the particle and bath, we prove that this correspondence is exact for quadratic potentials under arbitrary quantum state preparations of the particle itself. For more general, smooth potentials, we identify and exploit a natural small parameter: the density matrix becomes strongly quasidiagonal in the coordinate representation, with its off-diagonal width shrinking as the bath's spectral cutoff increases, providing a controlled parameter for accurate approximation. The framework is fully general: arbitrary initial quantum states-including highly non-classical superpositions-are incorporated via their Wigner functions, which serve as statistical weights for trajectory ensembles. Furthermore, the formalism naturally accommodates external manipulations and measurements modeled by preparation functions acting at arbitrary times, enabling the simulation of complex driven-dissipative quantum protocols.
We present a framework for efficient extraction of the viscosity solutions of nonlinear Hamilton-Jacobi equations with convex Hamiltonians. These viscosity solutions play a central role in areas such as front propagation, mean-field games, optimal control, machine learning, and a direct application to the forced Burgers' equation. Our method is based on an entropy penalisation method proposed by Gomes and Valdinoci, which generalises the Cole-Hopf transform from quadratic to general convex Hamiltonians, allowing a reformulation of viscous Hamilton-Jacobi dynamics by a discrete-time linear dynamics which approximates a linear heat-like parabolic equation, and can also extend to continuous-time dynamics. This makes the method suitable for quantum simulation. The validity of these results hold for arbitrary nonlinearity that correspond to convex Hamiltonians, and for arbitrarily long times, thus obviating a chief obstacle in most quantum algorithms for nonlinear partial differential equations. We provide quantum algorithms, both analog and digital, for extracting pointwise values, gradients, minima, and function evaluations at the minimiser of the viscosity solution, without requiring nonlinear updates or full state reconstruction.
We demonstrate deterministic preparation of arbitrary two-component product states of fermionic 6^6Li atoms in an 8×\times8 optical tweezer array, achieving motional ground-state fidelities above 98.5\%. Leveraging the large differential magnetic moments for spin-resolution, with parallelized site- and number-resolved control, our approach addresses key challenges for low-entropy quantum state engineering. Combined with high-fidelity spin-, site-, and density-resolved readout within a single \qty{20}{\us} exposure, and \qty{3}{\s} experimental cycles, these advances establish a fast, scalable, and programmable architecture for fermionic quantum simulation.
Researchers at CEICO, Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, resolved discrepancies between theoretical predictions and numerical simulations for entanglement entropy through topological defects. They developed a new framework for constructing reduced density matrices that accurately accounts for twisted sectors and excited states, successfully reproducing all known numerical results for the Ising model.
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