Abstract
Uncovering the origin of the “arrow of time” remains a fundamental scientific challenge. Within the framework of statistical physics, this problem was inextricably associated with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which declares that entropy growth proceeds from the system’s entanglement with the environment. This poses a question of whether it is possible to develop protocols for circumventing the irreversibility of time and if so to practically implement these protocols. Here we show that, while in nature the complex conjugation needed for time reversal may appear exponentially improbable, one can design a quantum algorithm that includes complex conjugation and thus reverses a given quantum state. Using this algorithm on an IBM quantum computer enables us to experimentally demonstrate a backward time dynamics for an electron scattered on a two-level impurity.
Highlights
Uncovering the origin of the “arrow of time” remains a fundamental scientific challenge
In the spirit of quantum mechanics, we elaborate on the implications of the Wigner’s result[30] that time reversal operation is anti-unitary because it requires complex conjugation
We demonstrate that this emerging anti-unitarity predicates that the universal time reversal operation does not spontaneously appear in nature
Summary
Uncovering the origin of the “arrow of time” remains a fundamental scientific challenge. In the spirit of quantum mechanics, we elaborate on the implications of the Wigner’s result[30] that time reversal operation is anti-unitary because it requires complex conjugation. We quantify the complexity of the preparation of the time-reversed quantum state and the probability of its spontaneous emergence.
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