No Arabic abstract
In this thesis we present new results relevant to two important problems in quantum information science: the development of a theory of entanglement and the exploration of the use of controlled quantum systems to the simulation of quantum many-body phenomena. In the first part we introduce a new approach to the study of entanglement by considering its manipulation under operations not capable of generating entanglement and show there is a total order for multipartite quantum states in this framework. We also present new results on hypothesis testing of correlated sources and give further evidence on the existence of NPPT bound entanglement. In the second part, we study the potential as well as the limitations of a quantum computer for calculating properties of many-body systems. First we analyse the usefulness of quantum computation to calculate additive approximations to partition functions and spectral densities of local Hamiltonians. We then show that the determination of ground state energies of local Hamiltonians with an inverse polynomial spectral gap is QCMA-hard. In the third and last part, we approach the problem of quantum simulating many-body systems from a more pragmatic point of view. We analyze the realization of paradigmatic condensed matter Hamiltonians in arrays of coupled microcavities, such as the Bose-Hubbard and the anisotropic Heisenberg models, and discuss the feasibility of an experimental realization with state-of-the-art current technology.
We present a quantum algorithm for simulating the dynamics of a first-quantized Hamiltonian in real space based on the truncated Taylor series algorithm. We avoid the possibility of singularities by applying various cutoffs to the system and using a high-order finite difference approximation to the kinetic energy operator. We find that our algorithm can simulate $eta$ interacting particles using a number of calculations of the pairwise interactions that scales, for a fixed spatial grid spacing, as $tilde{O}(eta^2)$, versus the $tilde{O}(eta^5)$ time required by previous methods (assuming the number of orbitals is proportional to $eta$), and scales super-polynomially better with the error tolerance than algorithms based on the Lie-Trotter-Suzuki product formula. Finally, we analyze discretization errors that arise from the spatial grid and show that under some circumstances these errors can remove the exponential speedups typically afforded by quantum simulation.
We introduce and explore a one-dimensional hybrid quantum circuit model consisting of both unitary gates and projective measurements. While the unitary gates are drawn from a random distribution and act uniformly in the circuit, the measurements are made at random positions and times throughout the system. By varying the measurement rate we can tune between the volume law entangled phase for the random unitary circuit model (no measurements) and a quantum Zeno phase where strong measurements suppress the entanglement growth to saturate in an area-law. Extensive numerical simulations of the quantum trajectories of the many-particle wavefunctions (exploiting Clifford circuitry to access systems up to 512 qubits) provide evidence for a stable weak measurement phase that exhibits volume-law entanglement entropy, with a coefficient decreasing with increasing measurement rate. We also present evidence for a novel continuous quantum dynamical phase transition between the weak measurement phase and the quantum Zeno phase, driven by a competition between the entangling tendencies of unitary evolution and the disentangling tendencies of projective measurements. Detailed steady-state and dynamic critical properties of this novel quantum entanglement transition are accessed.
While quantum computers are capable of simulating many quantum systems efficiently, the simulation algorithms must begin with the preparation of an appropriate initial state. We present a method for generating physically relevant quantum states on a lattice in real space. In particular, the present algorithm is able to prepare general pure and mixed many-particle states of any number of particles. It relies on a procedure for converting from a second-quantized state to its first-quantized counterpart. The algorithm is efficient in that it operates in time that is polynomial in all the essential descriptors of the system, such the number of particles, the resolution of the lattice, and the inverse of the maximum final error. This scaling holds under the assumption that the wavefunction to be prepared is bounded or its indefinite integral known and that the Fock operator of the system is efficiently simulatable.
Quantum simulators are attractive as a means to study many-body quantum systems that are not amenable to classical numerical treatment. A versatile framework for quantum simulation is offered by superconducting circuits. In this perspective, we discuss how superconducting circuits allow the engineering of a wide variety of interactions, which in turn allows the simulation of a wide variety of model Hamiltonians. In particular we focus on strong photon-photon interactions mediated by nonlinear elements. This includes on-site, nearest-neighbour and four-body interactions in lattice models, allowing the implementation of extended Bose-Hubbard models and the toric code. We discuss not only the present state in analogue quantum simulation, but also future perspectives of superconducting quantum simulation that open up when concatenating quantum gates in emerging quantum computing platforms.
We derive an exact lower bound to a universal measure of frustration in degenerate ground states of quantum many-body systems. The bound results in the sum of two contributions: entanglement and classical correlations arising from local measurements. We show that average frustration properties are completely determined by the behavior of the maximally mixed ground state. We identify sufficient conditions for a quantum spin system to saturate the bound, and for models with twofold degeneracy we prove that average and local frustration coincide.