No Arabic abstract
Computer simulation of observable phenomena is an indispensable tool for engineering new technology, understanding the natural world, and studying human society. Yet the most interesting systems are often complex, such that simulating their future behaviour demands storing immense amounts of information regarding how they have behaved in the past. For increasingly complex systems, simulation becomes increasingly difficult and is ultimately constrained by resources such as computer memory. Recent theoretical work shows quantum theory can reduce this memory requirement beyond ultimate classical limits (as measured by a process statistical complexity, C). Here we experimentally demonstrate this quantum advantage in simulating stochastic processes. Our quantum implementation observes a memory requirement of C_q = 0.05 $pm$ 0.01, far below the ultimate classical limit of C = 1. Scaling up this technique would substantially reduce the memory required in simulation of more complex systems.
This brief article gives an overview of quantum mechanics as a {em quantum probability theory}. It begins with a review of the basic operator-algebraic elements that connect probability theory with quantum probability theory. Then quantum stochastic processes is formulated as a generalization of stochastic processes within the framework of quantum probability theory. Quantum Markov models from quantum optics are used to explicitly illustrate the underlying abstract concepts and their connections to the quantum regression theorem from quantum optics.
Coherently manipulating multipartite quantum correlations leads to remarkable advantages in quantum information processing. A fundamental question is whether such quantum advantages persist only by exploiting multipartite correlations, such as entanglement. Recently, Dale, Jennings, and Rudolph negated the question by showing that a randomness processing, quantum Bernoulli factory, using quantum coherence, is strictly more powerful than the one with classical mechanics. In this Letter, focusing on the same scenario, we propose a theoretical protocol that is classically impossible but can be implemented solely using quantum coherence without entanglement. We demonstrate the protocol by exploiting the high-fidelity quantum state preparation and measurement with a superconducting qubit in the circuit quantum electrodynamics architecture and a nearly quantum-limited parametric amplifier. Our experiment shows the advantage of using quantum coherence of a single qubit for information processing even when multipartite correlation is not present.
A growing body of work has established the modelling of stochastic processes as a promising area of application for quantum techologies; it has been shown that quantum models are able to replicate the future statistics of a stochastic process whilst retaining less information about the past than any classical model must -- even for a purely classical process. Such memory-efficient models open a potential future route to study complex systems in greater detail than ever before, and suggest profound consequences for our notions of structure in their dynamics. Yet, to date methods for constructing these quantum models are based on having a prior knowledge of the optimal classical model. Here, we introduce a protocol for blind inference of the memory structure of quantum models -- tailored to take advantage of quantum features -- direct from time-series data, in the process highlighting the robustness of their structure to noise. This in turn provides a way to construct memory-efficient quantum models of stochastic processes whilst circumventing certain drawbacks that manifest solely as a result of classical information processing in classical inference protocols.
Atomic ions trapped in ultra-high vacuum form an especially well-understood and useful physical system for quantum information processing. They provide excellent shielding of quantum information from environmental noise, while strong, well-controlled laser interactions readily provide quantum logic gates. A number of basic quantum information protocols have been demonstrated with trapped ions. Much current work aims at the construction of large-scale ion-trap quantum computers using complex microfabricated trap arrays. Several groups are also actively pursuing quantum interfacing of trapped ions with photons.
In quantum communication networks, wires represent well-defined trajectories along which quantum systems are transmitted. In spite of this, trajectories can be used as a quantum control to govern the order of different noisy communication channels, and such a control has been shown to enable the transmission of information even when quantum communication protocols through well-defined trajectories fail. This result has motivated further investigations on the role of the superposition of trajectories in enhancing communication, which revealed that the use of quantum control of parallel communication channels, or of channels in series with quantum-controlled operations, can also lead to communication advantages. Building upon these findings, here we experimentally and numerically compare different ways in which two trajectories through a pair of noisy channels can be superposed. We observe that, within the framework of quantum interferometry, the use of channels in series with quantum-controlled operations generally yields the largest advantages. Our results contribute to clarify the nature of these advantages in experimental quantum-optical scenarios, and showcase the benefit of an extension of the quantum communication paradigm in which both the information exchanged and the trajectory of the information carriers are quantum.