No Arabic abstract
Central to the success of adaptive systems is their ability to interpret signals from their environment and respond accordingly -- they act as agents interacting with their surroundings. Such agents typically perform better when able to execute increasingly complex strategies. This comes with a cost: the more information the agent must recall from its past experiences, the more memory it will need. Here we investigate the power of agents capable of quantum information processing. We uncover the most general form a quantum agent need adopt to maximise memory compression advantages, and provide a systematic means of encoding their memory states. We show these encodings can exhibit extremely favourable scaling advantages relative to memory-minimal classical agents when information must be retained about events increasingly far into the past.
We demonstrate the existence of a finite temperature threshold for a 1D stabilizer code under an error correcting protocol that requires only a fraction of the syndrome measurements. Below the threshold temperature, encoded states have exponentially long lifetimes, as demonstrated by numerical and analytical arguments. We sketch how this algorithm generalizes to higher dimensional stabilizer codes with string-like excitations, like the toric code.
To use quantum systems for technological applications we first need to preserve their coherence for macroscopic timescales, even at finite temperature. Quantum error correction has made it possible to actively correct errors that affect a quantum memory. An attractive scenario is the construction of passive storage of quantum information with minimal active support. Indeed, passive protection is the basis of robust and scalable classical technology, physically realized in the form of the transistor and the ferromagnetic hard disk. The discovery of an analogous quantum system is a challenging open problem, plagued with a variety of no-go theorems. Several approaches have been devised to overcome these theorems by taking advantage of their loopholes. Here we review the state-of-the-art developments in this field in an informative and pedagogical way. We give the main principles of self-correcting quantum memories and we analyze several milestone examples from the literature of two-, three- and higher-dimensional quantum memories.
Efficient sampling from a classical Gibbs distribution is an important computational problem with applications ranging from statistical physics over Monte Carlo and optimization algorithms to machine learning. We introduce a family of quantum algorithms that provide unbiased samples by preparing a state encoding the entire Gibbs distribution. We show that this approach leads to a speedup over a classical Markov chain algorithm for several examples including the Ising model and sampling from weighted independent sets of two different graphs. Our approach connects computational complexity with phase transitions, providing a physical interpretation of quantum speedup. Moreover, it opens the door to exploring potentially useful sampling algorithms on near-term quantum devices as the algorithm for sampling from independent sets on certain graphs can be naturally implemented using Rydberg atom arrays.
Reversible entanglement transfer between light and matter is a crucial requisite for the ongoing developments of quantum information technologies. Quantum networks and their envisioned applications, e.g., secure communications beyond direct transmission, distributed quantum computing or enhanced sensing, rely on entanglement distribution between nodes. Although entanglement transfer has been demonstrated, a current roadblock is the limited efficiency of this process that can compromise the scalability of multi-step architectures. Here we demonstrate the efficient transfer of heralded single-photon entanglement into and out-of two quantum memories based on large ensembles of cold cesium atoms. We achieve an overall storage-and-retrieval efficiency of 85% together with a preserved suppression of the two-photon component of about 10% of the value for a coherent state. Our work constitutes an important capability that is needed towards large scale networks and increased functionality.
We state and prove four types of Lieb-Robinson bounds valid for many-body open quantum systems with power law decaying interactions undergoing out of equilibrium dynamics. We also provide an introductory and self-contained discussion of the setting and tools necessary to prove these results. The results found here apply to physical systems in which both long-ranged interactions and dissipation are present, as commonly encountered in certain quantum simulators, such as Rydberg systems or Coulomb crystals formed by ions.