Continuous‐variable quantum information processing

Observables of quantum systems can possess either a discrete or a continuous spectrum. For example, upon measurements of the photon number of a light state, discrete outcomes will result whereas measurements of the light's quadrature amplitudes result in continuous outcomes. If one uses the continuous degree of freedom of a quantum system for encoding, processing or detecting information, one enters the field of continuous‐variable (CV) quantum information processing. In this paper we review the basic principles of CV quantum information processing with main focus on recent developments in the field. We will be addressing the three main stages of a quantum information system; the preparation stage where quantum information is encoded into CVs of coherent states and single‐photon states, the processing stage where CV information is manipulated to carry out a specified protocol and a detection stage where CV information is measured using homodyne detection or photon counting.     

Alternatives to eigenstate thermalization

An isolated quantum many-body system in an initial pure state will come to thermal equilibrium if it satisfies the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH). We consider alternatives to ETH that have been proposed. We first show that von Neumann's quantum ergodic theorem relies on an assumption that is essentially equivalent to ETH. We also investigate whether, following a sudden quench, special classes of pure states can lead to thermal behavior in systems that do not obey ETH, namely, integrable systems. We find examples of this, but only for initial states that obeyed ETH before the quench.     

Quantum spin dynamics of mode-squeezed Luttinger liquids in two-component atomic gases

We report on the observation of many-body spin dynamics of interacting, one-dimensional (1D) ultracold bosonic gases with two spin states. By controlling the nonlinear atomic interactions close to a Feshbach resonance we are able to induce a phase diffusive many-body spin dynamics of the relative phase between the two components. We monitor this dynamical evolution by Ramsey interferometry, supplemented by a novel, many-body echo technique, which unveils the role of quantum fluctuations in 1D. We find that the time evolution of the system is well described by a Luttinger liquid initially prepared in a multimode squeezed state. Our approach allows us to probe the nonequilibrium evolution of one-dimensional many-body quantum systems.     

Symmetry breaking and finite-size effects in quantum many-body systems

We consider a quantum many-body system on a lattice which exhibits a spontaneous symmetry breaking in its infinite-volume ground states, but in which the corresponding order operator does not commute with the Hamiltonian. Typical examples are the Heisenberg antiferromagnet with a Néel order and the Hubbard model with a (superconducting) off-diagonal long-range order. In the corresponding finite system, the symmetry breaking is usually obscured by quantum fluctuation and one gets a symmetric ground state with a long-range order. In such a situation, Horsch and von der Linden proved that the finite system has a low-lying eigenstate whose excitation energy is not more than of orderN ^–1, whereN denotes the number of sites in the lattice. Here we study the situation where the broken symmetry is a continuous one. For a particular set of states (which are orthogonal to the ground state and with each other), we prove bounds for their energy expectation values. The bounds establish that there exist ever-increasing numbers of low-lying eigenstates whose excitation energies are bounded by a constant timesN ^–1. A crucial feature of the particular low-lying states we consider is that they can be regarded as finite-volume counterparts of the infinite-volume ground states. By forming linear combinations of these low-lying states and the (finite-volume) ground state and by taking infinite-volume limits, we construct infinite-volume ground states with explicit symmetry breaking. We conjecture that these infinite-volume ground states are ergodic, i.e., physically natural. Our general theorems not only shed light on the nature of symmetry breaking in quantum many-body systems, but also provide indispensable information for numerical approaches to these systems. We also discuss applications of our general results to a variety of interesting examples. The present paper is intended to be accessible to readers without background in mathematical approaches to quantum many-body systems.     

Quantum Phase Transitions in Conventional Matrix Product Systems

For matrix product states(MPSs) of one-dimensional spin-\(\frac {1}{2}\) chains, we investigate a new kind of conventional quantum phase transition(QPT). We find that the system has two different ferromagnetic phases; on the line of the two ferromagnetic phases coexisting equally, the system in the thermodynamic limit is in an isolated mediate-coupling state described by a paramagnetic state and is in the same state as the renormalization group fixed point state, the expectation values of the physical quantities are discontinuous, and any two spin blocks of the system have the same geometry quantum discord(GQD) within the range of open interval (0,0.25) and the same classical correlation(CC) within the range of open interval (0,0.75) compared to any phase having no any kind of correlation. We not only realize the control of QPTs but also realize the control of quantum correlation of quantum many-body systems on the critical line by adjusting the environment parameters, which may have potential application in quantum information fields and is helpful to comprehensively and deeply understand the quantum correlation, and the organization and structure of quantum correlation especially for long-range quantum correlation of quantum many-body systems.     

Entanglement detection in the vicinity of arbitrary Dicke states

Dicke states represent a class of multipartite entangled states that can be generated experimentally with many applications in quantum information. We propose a method to experimentally detect genuine multipartite entanglement in the vicinity of arbitrary Dicke states. The detection scheme can be used to experimentally quantify the entanglement depth of many-body systems and is easy to implement as it requires measurement of only three collective spin operators. The detection criterion is strong as it heralds multipartite entanglement even in cases where the state fidelity goes down exponentially with the number of qubits.     

On Isospectral Deformations of an Inhomogeneous String

For an anyon model in two spatial dimensions described by a modular tensor category, the topological S-matrix encodes the mutual braiding statistics, the quantum dimensions, and the fusion rules of anyons. It is nontrivial whether one can compute the S-matrix from a single ground state wave function. Here, we define a class of Hamiltonians consisting of local commuting projectors and an associated matrix that is invariant under local unitary transformations. We argue that the invariant is equivalent to the topological S-matrix. The definition does not require degeneracy of the ground state. We prove that the invariant depends on the state only, in the sense that it can be computed by any Hamiltonian in the class of which the state is a ground state. As a corollary, we prove that any local quantum circuit that connects two ground states of quantum double models (discrete gauge theories) with non-isomorphic abelian groups must have depth that is at least linear in the system’s diameter. As a tool for the proof, a manifestly Hamiltonian-independent notion of locally invisible operators is introduced. This gives a sufficient condition for a many-body state not to be generated from a product state by any small depth quantum circuit; this is a many-body entanglement witness.     

Quantum state and process tomography via adaptive measurements

We investigate quantum state tomography(QST) for pure states and quantum process tomography(QPT) for unitary channels via adaptive measurements. For a quantum system with a d-dimensional Hilbert space, we first propose an adaptive protocol where only 2d. 1 measurement outcomes are used to accomplish the QST for all pure states. This idea is then extended to study QPT for unitary channels, where an adaptive unitary process tomography(AUPT) protocol of d2+d.1measurement outcomes is constructed for any unitary channel. We experimentally implement the AUPT protocol in a 2-qubit nuclear magnetic resonance system. We examine the performance of the AUPT protocol when applied to Hadamard gate, T gate(/8 phase gate), and controlled-NOT gate,respectively, as these gates form the universal gate set for quantum information processing purpose. As a comparison, standard QPT is also implemented for each gate. Our experimental results show that the AUPT protocol that reconstructing unitary channels via adaptive measurements significantly reduce the number of experiments required by standard QPT without considerable loss of fidelity.     

Entanglement and excited-state quantum phase transition in an extended Dicke model

We investigate the properties of entanglement and excited-state quantum phase transition (ESQPT) in a hybrid atom-optomechanical system in which an optomechanical quadratic interaction is introduced into a normal Dicke model. Interestingly, by preparing the ancillary mode in a coherent state, both the quantum entanglement and ESQPT can be realized in a relative weak-coupling condition. Moreover, the entanglement is immune to the A² term, and a reversed trend of the entropy is obtained when the A² term is included. Density of states (DoS) and Peres lattice are used to investigate ESQPTs. Compared to a normal Dicke model, the DoS enlarges exp(2r_α) times if the ancillary mode is prepared in a coherent state. This work is an extension of the ground-state quantum phase transition, which may inspire further exploration of the quantum criticality in many-body systems.     

Bidirectional Information Flow Quantum State Tomography

The exact reconstruction of many-body quantum systems is one of the major challenges in modern physics,because it is impractical to overcome the exponential complexity problem brought by high-dimensional quantum manybody systems.Recently,machine learning techniques are well used to promote quantum information research and quantum state tomography has also been developed by neural network generative models.We propose a quantum state tomography method,which is based on a bidirectional gated recurrent unit neural network,to learn and reconstruct both easy quantum states and hard quantum states in this study.We are able to use fewer measurement samples in our method to reconstruct these quantum states and to obtain high fidelity.     

Single-particle properties in an exactly solvable A-body system

A recent theorem states that for quantum many-body systems with short-range interactions the following property holds: the single-particle overlap functions, spectroscopic factors and separation energies of bound eigenstates of the (A ? 1)-particle system are fully determined by the one-body density matrix of the A-particle system in its ground state. We confirm this property, by explicit construction, for the case of a schematic, exactly solvable system.     

Entanglement propagation and typicality of measurements in the quantum Kac ring

We study the time evolution of entanglement in a new quantum version of the Kac ring, where two spin chains become dynamically entangled by quantum gates, which are used instead of the classical markers. The features of the entanglement evolution are best understood by using knowledge about the behavior of an ensemble of classical Kac rings. For instance, the recurrence time of the quantum many-body system is twice the length of the chain and “thermalization” only occurs on time scales much smaller than the dimension of the Hilbert space. The model thus elucidates the relation between the results of measurements in quantum and classical systems: While in classical systems repeated measurements are performed over an ensemble of systems, the corresponding result is obtained by measuring the same quantum system prepared in an appropriate superposition repeatedly.     

Evolution of Classical and Quantum States in the Groupoid Picture of Quantum Mechanics

The evolution of states of the composition of classical and quantum systems in the groupoid formalism for physical theories introduced recently is discussed. It is shown that the notion of a classical system, in the sense of Birkhoff and von Neumann, is equivalent, in the case of systems with a countable number of outputs, to a totally disconnected groupoid with Abelian von Neumann algebra. The impossibility of evolving a separable state of a composite system made up of a classical and a quantum one into an entangled state by means of a unitary evolution is proven in accordance with Raggio’s theorem, which is extended to include a new family of separable states corresponding to the composition of a system with a totally disconnected space of outcomes and a quantum one.     

微波调制的里德堡原子集体量子跳跃

对于一个三能级原子体系,原子的两个基态能级通过微波耦合起来,其中一个基态能级可被激发到里德堡态,从而可观察量子跳跃现象.本文采用量子轨线方法研究了微波调制的里德堡原子集体量子跳跃.研究结果表明,微波耦合基态能级可以提高光子关联,增强光子聚束效应,即使较少的原子中也可以观察到系统在高里德堡占据数态和低里德堡占据数态之间的切换.这一结果为将来进一步研究里德堡自旋晶格中的多体动力学提供了新思路.     

Revisiting Consistency Conditions for Quantum States of Systems on Closed Timelike Curves: An Epistemic Perspective

There has been considerable recent interest in the consequences of closed timelike curves (CTCs) for the dynamics of quantum mechanical systems. A vast majority of research into this area makes use of the dynamical equations developed by Deutsch, which were developed from a consistency condition that assumes that mixed quantum states uniquely describe the physical state of a system. We criticize this choice of consistency condition from an epistemic perspective, i.e., a perspective in which the quantum state represents a state of knowledge about a system. We demonstrate that directly applying Deutsch’s condition when mixed states are treated as representing an observer’s knowledge of a system can conceal time travel paradoxes from the observer, rather than resolving them. To shed further light on the appropriate dynamics for quantum systems traversing CTCs, we make use of a toy epistemic theory with a strictly classical ontology due to Spekkens and show that, in contrast to the results of Deutsch, many of the traditional paradoxical effects of time travel are present.     

Bounding the set of quantum correlations

We introduce a hierarchy of conditions necessarily satisfied by any distribution P_{alphabeta} representing the probabilities for two separate observers to obtain outcomes alpha and beta when making local measurements on a shared quantum state. Each condition in this hierarchy is formulated as a semidefinite program. Among other applications, our approach can be used to obtain upper bounds on the quantum violation of an arbitrary Bell inequality. It yields, for instance, tight bounds for the violations of the Collins et al. inequalities.     

Measuring entanglement in condensed matter systems

We show how entanglement may be quantified in spin and cold atom many-body systems using standard experimental techniques only. The scheme requires no assumptions on the state in the laboratory, and a lower bound to the entanglement can be read off directly from the scattering cross section of neutrons deflected from solid state samples or the time-of-flight distribution of cold atoms in optical lattices, respectively. This removes a major obstacle which so far has prevented the direct and quantitative experimental study of genuine quantum correlations in many-body systems: The need for a full characterization of the state to quantify the entanglement contained in it. Instead, the scheme presented here relies solely on global measurements that are routinely performed and is versatile enough to accommodate systems and measurements different from the ones we exemplify in this work.     

基于张量网络算法的自旋梯子系统的弦序参量的研究

通过基于矩阵乘积态(MPS)的强关联电子量子自旋梯子格点系统的张量网络(TN)算法,摸索研究自旋梯子量子多体系统的弦序参量,探测系统的量子相变点,刻画系统的量子临界现象,获取系统的量子相图,这为我们提供了一个研究自旋梯子系统的量子多体物理性质强有力的工具和方法:在不知道系统是否缺乏Landau对称性破缺序或者系统是否存在相关的拓扑弦序的情况下,可以先得到系统的基态波函数,如果基态缺乏Landau对称性破缺序,或可以通过其它方式找出系统存在若干非局域的弦序参量,来完整地描述一些拓扑量子相变点,获得系统的量子相图,从而丰富和发展了传统的Landau对称性破缺的相变理论.     

Quantum Correlation Properties in Composite Parity-Conserved Matrix Product States

We give a new thought for constructing long-range quantum correlation in quantum many-body systems. Our proposed composite parity-conserved matrix product state has long-range quantum correlation only for two spin blocks where their spin-block length larger than 1 compared to any subsystem only having short-range quantum correlation, and we investigate quantum correlation properties of two spin blocks varying with environment parameter and spacing spin number. We also find that the geometry quantum discords of two nearest-neighbor spin blocks and two next-nearest-neighbor spin blocks become smaller and for other conditions the geometry quantum discord becomes larger than that in any subcomponent, i.e., the increase or the production of the long-range quantum correlation is at the cost of reducing the short-range quantum correlation compared to the corresponding classical correlation and total correlation having no any characteristic of regulation. For nearest-neighbor and next-nearest-neighbor all the correlations take their maximal values at the same points, while for other conditions no whether for spacing same spin number or for different spacing spin numbers all the correlations taking their maximal values are respectively at different points which are very close. We believe that our work is helpful to comprehensively and deeply understand the organization and structure of quantum correlation especially for long-range quantum correlation of quantum many-body systems; and further helpful for the classification, the depiction and the measure of quantum correlation of quantum many-body systems.     

Deterministic Bidirectional Remote State Preparation of a- and Symmetric Quantum States with a Proper Quantum Channel

We present a new scheme for deterministically realizing the mutual interchange of quantum information between two distant parties via selected quantum states as the shared entangled resource. We first show the symmetric bidirectional remote state preparation (BRSP), where two single-qubit quantum states will be simultaneously exchanged in a deterministic manner provided that each of the users performs single-qubit von Neumann measurements with proper measurement bases as well as appropriate unitary operations, depending essentially on the outcomes of the prior measurements. Then we consider to extend the symmetric protocol to an asymmetric case, in which BRSP of a general single-qubit state and an arbitrary two-qubit state is investigated successfully. The necessary quantum operations and the employed quantum resources are feasible according to the present technology, resulting in that this protocol may be realizable in the realm of current physical experiment.