No Arabic 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 systems entanglement with the environment. It remains to be seen, however, whether the irreversibility of time is a fundamental law of nature or whether, on the contrary, it might be circumvented. Here we show that, while in nature the complex conjugation needed for time reversal is 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.
Pricing interest-rate financial derivatives is a major problem in finance, in which it is crucial to accurately reproduce the time-evolution of interest rates. Several stochastic dynamics have been proposed in the literature to model either the instantaneous interest rate or the instantaneous forward rate. A successful approach to model the latter is the celebrated Heath-Jarrow-Morton framework, in which its dynamics is entirely specified by volatility factors. On its multifactor version, this model considers several noisy components to capture at best the dynamics of several time-maturing forward rates. However, as no general analytical solution is available, there is a trade-off between the number of noisy factors considered and the computational time to perform a numerical simulation. Here, we employ the quantum principal component analysis to reduce the number of noisy factors required to accurately simulate the time evolution of several time-maturing forward rates. The principal components are experimentally estimated with the $5$-qubit IBMQX2 quantum computer for $2times 2$ and $3times 3$ cross-correlation matrices, which are based on historical data for two and three time-maturing forward rates. This manuscript is a first step towards the design of a general quantum algorithm to fully simulate on quantum computers the Heath-Jarrow-Morton model for pricing interest-rate financial derivatives. It shows indeed that practical applications of quantum computers in finance will be achievable in the near future.
Irreversibility is one of the most intriguing concepts in physics. While microscopic physical laws are perfectly reversible, macroscopic average behavior has a preferred direction of time. According to the second law of thermodynamics, this arrow of time is associated with a positive mean entropy production. Using a nuclear magnetic resonance setup, we measure the nonequilibrium entropy produced in an isolated spin-1/2 system following fast quenches of an external magnetic field and experimentally demonstrate that it is equal to the entropic distance, expressed by the Kullback-Leibler divergence, between a microscopic process and its time-reverse. Our result addresses the concept of irreversibility from a microscopic quantum standpoint.
We implement several quantum algorithms in real five-qubit superconducting quantum processor IBMqx4 to perform quantum computation of the dynamics of spin-1/2 particles interacting directly and indirectly through the boson field. Particularly, we focus on effects arising due to the presence of entanglement in the initial state of the system. The dynamics is implemented in a digital way using Trotter expansion of evolution operator. Our results demonstrate that dynamics in our modeling based on real device is governed by quantum interference effects being highly sensitive to phase parameters of the initial state. We also discuss limitations of our approach due to the device imperfection as well as possible scaling towards larger systems.
Quantum communication relies on the existence of entanglement between two nodes of a network. Since, entanglement can only be produced using local quantum operations, distribution of parts of this entangled system between different nodes becomes necessary. However, due to the extremely fragile nature of entanglement and the presence of losses in the communication channel, the direct distribution of entanglement over large distances is nearly impossible. Quantum repeaters have been proposed to solve this problem. These enable one to establish long-range entanglement by dividing the link into smaller parts, creating entanglement between each part and connecting them up to form the full link. As researchers race to establish entanglement over larger and larger distances, it becomes essential to gauge the performance and robustness of the different protocols that go into designing a quantum repeater, before deploying them in real life. Present day noisy quantum computers are ideal for this task as they can emulate the noisy environment in a quantum communication channel and provide a benchmark for how the protocols will perform on real-life hardware. In this paper, we report the circuit-level implementation of the complete architecture of a Quantum Repeater. All the protocols of the repeater have been bench-marked on IBM Q, the worlds first publicly available cloud quantum computer. The results of our experiment provide a measure for the fidelity of entanglement current repeaters can establish. In addition, the repeater protocol provides a robust benchmark for the current state-of-the-art of quantum computing hardware.
We report the first experimental demonstration of quantum synchronization. This is achieved by performing a digital simulation of a single spin-$1$ limit-cycle oscillator on the quantum computers of the IBM Q System. Applying an external signal to the oscillator, we verify typical features of quantum synchronization and demonstrate an interference-based quantum synchronization blockade. Our results show that state-of-the-art noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers are powerful enough to implement realistic dissipative quantum systems. Finally, we discuss limitations of current quantum hardware and define requirements necessary to investigate more complex problems.