Random Unitary Research Articles

Complexity is not enough for randomness

We study the dynamical generation of randomness in Brownian systems as a function of the degree of locality of the Hamiltonian. We first express the trace distance to a unitary design for these systems in terms of an effective equilibrium thermal partition function, and provide a set of conditions that guarantee a linear time to design. We relate the trace distance to design to spectral properties of the time-evolution operator. We apply these considerations to the Brownian pp-SYK model as a function of the degree of locality pp. We show that the time to design is linear, with a slope proportional to 1/p1/p. We corroborate that when pp is of order the system size this reproduces the behavior of a completely non-local Brownian model of random matrices. For the random matrix model, we reinterpret these results from the point of view of classical Brownian motion in the unitary manifold. Therefore, we find that the generation of randomness typically persists for exponentially long times in the system size, even for systems governed by highly non-local time-dependent Hamiltonians. We conjecture this to be a general property: there is no efficient way to generate approximate Haar random unitaries dynamically, unless a large degree of fine-tuning is present in the ensemble of time-dependent Hamiltonians. We contrast the slow generation of randomness to the growth of quantum complexity of the time-evolution operator. Using known bounds on circuit complexity for unitary designs, we obtain a lower bound determining that complexity grows at least linearly in time for Brownian systems. We argue that these bounds on circuit complexity are far from tight and that complexity grows at a much faster rate, at least for non-local systems.

Predicting arbitrary state properties from single Hamiltonian quench dynamics

Analog quantum simulation is an essential routine for quantum computing and plays a crucial role in studying quantum many-body physics. Typically, the quantum evolution of an analog simulator is largely determined by its physical characteristics, lacking the precise control or versatility of quantum gates. This limitation poses challenges in extracting physical properties on analog quantum simulators, an essential step of quantum simulations. To address this issue, we introduce the protocol, which uses a single quench Hamiltonian for estimating arbitrary state properties, eliminating the need for ancillary systems and random unitaries. Additionally, we derive the sample complexity of this protocol and show that it performs comparably to the classical shadow protocol. The Hamiltonian shadow protocol does not require sophisticated control and can be applied to a wide range of analog quantum simulators. We demonstrate its utility through numerical demonstrations with Rydberg atom arrays under realistic parameter settings. The new protocol significantly broadens the application of randomized measurements for analog quantum simulators without precise control and ancillary systems. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Decoupling by Local Random Unitaries without Simultaneous Smoothing, and Applications to Multi-user Quantum Information Tasks

We show that a simple telescoping sum trick, together with the triangle inequality and a tensorisation property of expected-contractive coefficients of random channels, allow us to achieve general simultaneous decoupling for multiple users via local actions. Employing both old (Dupuis et al. in Commun Math Phys 328:251–284, 2014) and new methods (Dupuis in IEEE Trans Inf Theory 69:7784–7792, 2023), we obtain bounds on the expected deviation from ideal decoupling either in the one-shot setting in terms of smooth min-entropies, or the finite block length setting in terms of Rényi entropies. These bounds are essentially optimal without the need to address the simultaneous smoothing conjecture, which remains unresolved. This leads to one-shot, finite block length, and asymptotic achievability results for several tasks in quantum Shannon theory, including local randomness extraction of multiple parties, multi-party assisted entanglement concentration, multi-party quantum state merging, and quantum coding for the quantum multiple access channel. Because of the one-shot nature of our protocols, we obtain achievability results without the need for time-sharing, which at the same time leads to easy proofs of the asymptotic coding theorems. We show that our one-shot decoupling bounds furthermore yield achievable rates (so far only conjectured) for all four tasks in compound settings, which are additionally optimal for entanglement of assistance and state merging.

Heisenberg-limited Hamiltonian learning for interacting bosons

We develop a protocol for learning a class of interacting bosonic Hamiltonians from dynamics with Heisenberg-limited scaling. For Hamiltonians with an underlying bounded-degree graph structure, we can learn all parameters with root mean square error ϵ using O(1/ϵ)\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$${\\mathcal{O}}(1/\\epsilon )$$\\end{document} total evolution time, which is independent of the system size, in a way that is robust against state-preparation and measurement error. In the protocol, we only use bosonic coherent states, beam splitters, phase shifters, and homodyne measurements, which are easy to implement on many experimental platforms. A key technique we develop is to apply random unitaries to enforce symmetry in the effective Hamiltonian, which may be of independent interest.

Typicality in random quantum scattering.

We consider scattering processes where a quantum system comprises an inner subsystem and a boundary and is subject to Haar-averaged random unitaries acting on the boundary-environment Hilbert space only. We show that, regardless of the initial state, a single scattering event will disentangle the unconditional state (i.e., the scattered state when no information about the applied unitary is available) across the inner subsystem-boundary partition. Also, we apply Lévy's lemma to constrain the trace norm fluctuations around the unconditional state. Finally, we derive analytical formulas for the mean scattered purity for initial globally pure states and provide one with numerical evidence of the reduction of fluctuations around such mean values with increasing environmental dimension.

Solvable Model of Quantum-Darwinism-Encoding Transitions.

We propose a solvable model of quantum Darwinism to encoding transitions-abrupt changes in how quantum information spreads in a many-body system under unitary dynamics. We consider a random Clifford circuit on an expanding tree, whose input qubit is entangled with a reference. The model has a quantum Darwinism phase, where one classical bit of information about the reference can be retrieved from an arbitrarily small fraction of the output qubits, and an encoding phase where such retrieval is impossible. The two phases are separated by a mixed phase and two continuous transitions. We compare the exact result to a two-replica calculation. The latter yields a similar "annealed" phase diagram, which applies also to a model with Haar random unitaries. We relate our approach to measurement-induced phase transitions (MIPTs), by solving a modified model where an environment eavesdrops on an encoding system. It has a sharp MIPT only with full access to the environment.

Entanglement Growth and Minimal Membranes in (d+1) Random Unitary Circuits.

Understanding the nature of entanglement growth in many-body systems is one of the fundamental questions in quantum physics. Here, we study this problem by characterizing the entanglement fluctuations and distribution of a (d+1)-dimensional qubit lattice evolved under a random unitary circuit. Focusing on Clifford gates, we perform extensive numerical simulations of random circuits in 1≤d≤4 dimensions. Our findings demonstrate that properties of growth of bipartite entanglement entropy are characterized by the roughening exponents of a d-dimensional membrane in a (d+1)-dimensional elastic medium.

The Petz (lite) recovery map for the scrambling channel

Abstract We study properties of the Petz recovery map in chaotic systems, such as the Hayden–Preskill setup for evaporating black holes and the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev (SYK) model. Since these systems exhibit the phenomenon called scrambling, we expect that the expression of the recovery channel $\mathcal {R}$ gets simplified, given by just the adjoint $\mathcal {N}^{\dagger }$ of the original channel $\mathcal {N}$ which defines the time evolution of the states in the code subspace embedded into the physical Hilbert space. We check this phenomenon in two examples. The first one is the Hayden–Preskill setup described by Haar random unitaries. We compute the relative entropy $S(\mathcal {R}\left[\mathcal {N}[\rho ]\right] ||\rho )$ and show that it vanishes when the decoupling is archived. We further show that the simplified recovery map is equivalent to the protocol proposed by Yoshida and Kitaev. The second example is the SYK model where the 2D code subspace is defined by an insertion of a fermionic operator, and the system is evolved by the SYK Hamiltonian. We check the recovery phenomenon by relating some matrix elements of an output density matrix $\langle{T}|\mathcal {R}[\mathcal {N}[\rho ]]|{T^{\prime }}\rangle$ to Rényi-two modular flowed correlators, and show that they coincide with the elements for the input density matrix with small error after twice the scrambling time.

Scrambling Transition in a Radiative Random Unitary Circuit

Scrambling Transition in a Radiative Random Unitary Circuit

Random unitaries, Robustness, and Complexity of Entanglement

It is widely accepted that the dynamic of entanglement in presence of a generic circuit can be predicted by the knowledge of the statistical properties of the entanglement spectrum. We tested this assumption by applying a Metropolis-like entanglement cooling algorithm generated by different sets of local gates, on states sharing the same statistic. We employ the ground states of a unique model, namely the one-dimensional Ising chain with a transverse field, but belonging to different macroscopic phases such as the paramagnetic, the magnetically ordered, and the topological frustrated ones. Quite surprisingly, we observe that the entanglement dynamics are strongly dependent not just on the different sets of gates but also on the phase, indicating that different phases can possess different types of entanglement (which we characterize as purely local, GHZ-like, and W-state-like) with different degree of resilience against the cooling process. Our work highlights the fact that the knowledge of the entanglement spectrum alone is not sufficient to determine its dynamics, thereby demonstrating its incompleteness as a characterization tool. Moreover, it shows a subtle interplay between locality and non-local constraints.

The holographic map of an evaporating black hole

We construct a holographic map that takes the semi-classical state of an evaporating black hole and its Hawking radiation to a microscopic model that reflects the scrambling dynamics of the black hole. The microscopic model is given by a nested sequence of random unitaries, each one implementing a scrambling time step of the black hole evolution. Differently from other models, energy conservation and the thermal nature of the Hawking radiation are taken into account. We show that the QES formula follows for the entropy of multiple subsets of the radiation and black hole. We further show that a version of entanglement wedge reconstruction can be proved by computing suitable trace norms and quantum fidelities involving the action of a unitary on a subset of Hawking partners. If the Hawking partner is in an island, its unitary can be reconstructed by a unitary on the radiation. We also adopt a similar setup and analyse reconstruction of unitaries acting on an infalling system.

Entanglement entropy production in Quantum Neural Networks

Quantum Neural Networks (QNN) are considered a candidate for achieving quantum advantage in the Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum computer (NISQ) era. Several QNN architectures have been proposed and successfully tested on benchmark datasets for machine learning. However, quantitative studies of the QNN-generated entanglement have been investigated only for up to few qubits. Tensor network methods allow to emulate quantum circuits with a large number of qubits in a wide variety of scenarios. Here, we employ matrix product states to characterize recently studied QNN architectures with random parameters up to fifty qubits showing that their entanglement, measured in terms of entanglement entropy between qubits, tends to that of Haar distributed random states as the depth of the QNN is increased. We certify the randomness of the quantum states also by measuring the expressibility of the circuits, as well as using tools from random matrix theory. We show a universal behavior for the rate at which entanglement is created in any given QNN architecture, and consequently introduce a new measure to characterize the entanglement production in QNNs: the entangling speed. Our results characterise the entanglement properties of quantum neural networks, and provides new evidence of the rate at which these approximate random unitaries.

Page curves and typical entanglement in linear optics

Bosonic Gaussian states are a special class of quantum states in an infinite dimensional Hilbert space that are relevant to universal continuous-variable quantum computation as well as to near-term quantum sampling tasks such as Gaussian Boson Sampling. In this work, we study entanglement within a set of squeezed modes that have been evolved by a random linear optical unitary. We first derive formulas that are asymptotically exact in the number of modes for the Rényi-2 Page curve (the average Rényi-2 entropy of a subsystem of a pure bosonic Gaussian state) and the corresponding Page correction (the average information of the subsystem) in certain squeezing regimes. We then prove various results on the typicality of entanglement as measured by the Rényi-2 entropy by studying its variance. Using the aforementioned results for the Rényi-2 entropy, we upper and lower bound the von Neumann entropy Page curve and prove certain regimes of entanglement typicality as measured by the von Neumann entropy. Our main proofs make use of a symmetry property obeyed by the average and the variance of the entropy that dramatically simplifies the averaging over unitaries. In this light, we propose future research directions where this symmetry might also be exploited. We conclude by discussing potential applications of our results and their generalizations to Gaussian Boson Sampling and to illuminating the relationship between entanglement and computational complexity.

An Uncertainty Relation for Measurements of Random Unitary Channels Acting on a Qubit

By preparing an input state and measuring an observable for the output state, we can measure a quantum channel. Following the formulation given by Xiao et al., we study an uncertainty relation for ancilla-free measurements of random unitary channels acting on a qubit. We obtain an explicit formula and give a necessary and sufficient condition for this formula to be nontrivial.

Correlation between resource-generating powers of quantum gates

We analyze the optimal basis for generating the maximum relative entropy of quantum coherence by an arbitrary gate on a two-qubit system. The optimal basis is not unique, and the high quantum coherence generating gates are also typically high entanglement generating ones and vice versa. However, the profile of the relative frequencies of Haar random unitaries generating different amounts of entanglement for a fixed amount of quantum coherence is different from the one in which the roles of entanglement and quantum coherence are reversed, although both follow the beta distribution.

Correcting Coherent Errors by Random Operation on Actual Quantum Hardware

Characterizing and mitigating errors in current noisy intermediate-scale devices is important to improve the performance of the next generation of quantum hardware. To investigate the importance of the different noise mechanisms affecting quantum computation, we performed a full quantum process tomography of single qubits in a real quantum processor in which echo experiments are implemented. In addition to the sources of error already included in the standard models, the obtained results show the dominant role of coherent errors, which we practically corrected by inserting random single-qubit unitaries in the quantum circuit, significantly increasing the circuit length over which quantum computations on actual quantum hardware produce reliable results.

Probing sign structure using measurement-induced entanglement

The sign structure of quantum states is closely connected to quantum phases of matter, yet detecting such fine-grained properties of amplitudes is subtle. Here we employ as a diagnostic measurement-induced entanglement (MIE): the average entanglement generated between two parties after measuring the rest of the system. We propose that for a sign-free state, the MIE upon measuring in the sign-free basis decays no slower than correlations in the state before measurement. Concretely, we prove that MIE is upper bounded by mutual information for sign-free stabilizer states (essentially CSS codes), which establishes a bound between scaling dimensions of conformal field theories describing measurement-induced critical points in stabilizer systems. We also show that for sign-free qubit wavefunctions, MIE between two qubits is upper bounded by a simple two-point correlation function, and we verify our proposal in several critical ground states of one-dimensional systems, including the transverse field and tri-critical Ising models. In contrast, for states with sign structure, such bounds can be violated, as we illustrate in critical hybrid circuits involving both Haar or Clifford random unitaries and measurements, and gapless symmetry-protected topological states.

Entanglement dynamics of noisy random circuits

The process by which open quantum systems thermalize with an environment is both of fundamental interest and relevant to noisy quantum devices. As a minimal model of this process, we consider a qudit chain evolving under local random unitaries and local depolarization channels. After mapping to a statistical mechanics model, the depolarization (noise) acts like a symmetry-breaking field, and we argue that it causes the system to thermalize within a timescale independent of system size. We show that various bipartite entanglement measures---mutual information, operator entanglement, and entanglement negativity---grow at a speed proportional to the size of the bipartition boundary. As a result, these entanglement measures obey an area law: Their maximal value during the dynamics is bounded by the boundary instead of the volume. In contrast, if the depolarization only acts at the system boundary, then the maximum value of the entanglement measures obeys a volume law. We complement our analysis with scalable simulations involving Clifford gates, for both one- and two-dimensional systems.

Barren plateaus from learning scramblers with local cost functions

The existence of barren plateaus has recently revealed new training challenges in quantum machine learning (QML). Uncovering the mechanisms behind barren plateaus is essential in understanding the scope of problems that QML can efficiently tackle. Barren plateaus have recently been shown to exist when learning global properties of random unitaries, which is relevant when learning black hole dynamics. Establishing whether local cost functions can circumvent these barren plateaus is pertinent if we hope to apply QML to quantum many-body systems. We prove a no-go theorem showing that local cost functions encounter barren plateaus in learning random unitary properties.

Truncations of Random Unitary Matrices Drawn from Hua-Pickrell Distribution

Let U be a random unitary matrix drawn from the Hua-Pickrell distribution \(\mu _{\textrm{U}(n+m)}^{(\delta )}\) on the unitary group \(\textrm{U}(n+m)\). We show that the eigenvalues of the truncated unitary matrix \([U_{i,j}]_{1\le i,j\le n}\) form a determinantal point process \(\mathscr {X}_n^{(m,\delta )}\) on the unit disc \(\mathbb {D}\) for any \(\delta \in \mathbb {C}\) satisfying \(\textrm{Re}\,\delta >-1/2\). We also prove that the limiting point process taken by \(n\rightarrow \infty \) of the determinantal point process \(\mathscr {X}_n^{(m,\delta )}\) is always \(\mathscr {X}^{[m]}\), independent of \(\delta \). Here \(\mathscr {X}^{[m]}\) is the determinantal point process on \(\mathbb {D}\) with weighted Bergman kernel $$\begin{aligned} \begin{aligned} K^{[m]}(z,w)=\frac{1}{(1-z{\overline{w}})^{m+1}} \end{aligned} \end{aligned}$$with respect to the reference measure \(d\mu ^{[m]}(z)=\frac{m}{\pi }(1-|z|)^{m-1}d\sigma (z)\), where \(d\sigma (z)\) is the Lebesgue measure on \(\mathbb {D}\).