No Arabic abstract
Quantum scrambling is the dispersal of local information into many-body quantum entanglements and correlations distributed throughout the entire system. This concept underlies the dynamics of thermalization in closed quantum systems, and more recently has emerged as a powerful tool for characterizing chaos in black holes. However, the direct experimental measurement of quantum scrambling is difficult, owing to the exponential complexity of ergodic many-body entangled states. One way to characterize quantum scrambling is to measure an out-of-time-ordered correlation function (OTOC); however, since scrambling leads to their decay, OTOCs do not generally discriminate between quantum scrambling and ordinary decoherence. Here, we implement a quantum circuit that provides a positive test for the scrambling features of a given unitary process. This approach conditionally teleports a quantum state through the circuit, providing an unambiguous litmus test for scrambling while projecting potential circuit errors into an ancillary observable. We engineer quantum scrambling processes through a tunable 3-qubit unitary operation as part of a 7-qubit circuit on an ion trap quantum computer. Measured teleportation fidelities are typically $sim80%$, and enable us to experimentally bound the scrambling-induced decay of the corresponding OTOC measurement.
We provide a protocol to measure out-of-time-order correlation functions. These correlation functions are of theoretical interest for diagnosing the scrambling of quantum information in black holes and strongly interacting quantum systems generally. Measuring them requires an echo-type sequence in which the sign of a many-body Hamiltonian is reversed. We detail an implementation employing cold atoms and cavity quantum electrodynamics to realize the chaotic kicked top model, and we analyze effects of dissipation to verify its feasibility with current technology. Finally, we propose in broad strokes a number of other experimental platforms where similar out-of-time-order correlation functions can be measured.
How violently do two quantum operators disagree? Different fields of physics feature different measures of incompatibility: (i) In quantum information theory, entropic uncertainty relations constrain measurement outcomes. (ii) In condensed matter and high-energy physics, the out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) signals scrambling, the spread of information through many-body entanglement. We unite these measures, proving entropic uncertainty relations for scrambling. The entropies are of distributions over weak and strong measurements possible outcomes. The weak measurements ensure that the OTOC quasiprobability (a nonclassical generalization of a probability, which coarse-grains to the OTOC) governs terms in the uncertainty bound. The quasiprobability causes scrambling to strengthen the bound in numerical simulations of a spin chain. This strengthening shows that entropic uncertainty relations can reflect the type of operator disagreement behind scrambling. Generalizing beyond scrambling, we prove entropic uncertainty relations satisfied by commonly performed weak-measurement experiments. We unveil a physical significance of weak values (conditioned expectation values): as governing terms in entropic uncertainty bounds.
Interaction in quantum systems can spread initially localized quantum information into the many degrees of freedom of the entire system. Understanding this process, known as quantum scrambling, is the key to resolving various conundrums in physics. Here, by measuring the time-dependent evolution and fluctuation of out-of-time-order correlators, we experimentally investigate the dynamics of quantum scrambling on a 53-qubit quantum processor. We engineer quantum circuits that distinguish the two mechanisms associated with quantum scrambling, operator spreading and operator entanglement, and experimentally observe their respective signatures. We show that while operator spreading is captured by an efficient classical model, operator entanglement requires exponentially scaled computational resources to simulate. These results open the path to studying complex and practically relevant physical observables with near-term quantum processors.
Quantum information scrambling has attracted much attention amid the effort to reconcile the conflict between quantum-mechanical unitarity and the thermalizaiton-irreversibility in many-body systems. Here we propose an unconventional mechanism to generate quantum information scrambling through a high-complexity mapping from logical to physical degrees-of-freedom that hides the logical information into non-separable many-body-correlations. Corresponding to this mapping, we develop an algorithm to efficiently sample a Slater-determinant wavefunction and compute all physical observables in dynamics with a polynomial cost in system-size. The system shows information scrambling in the quantum many-body Hilbert space characterized by the spreading of Hamming-distance. At late time, we find emergence of classical diffusion dynamics in this quantum many-body system. We establish that the operator-mapping enabled growth in out-of-time-order-correlator exhibits exponential-scrambling behavior. The quantum information-hiding mapping approach may shed light on the understanding of fundamental connections among computational complexity, information scrambling and quantum thermalization.
The information scrambling in many-body systems is closely related to quantum chaotic dynamics, complexity, and gravity. Here we propose a collision model to simulate the information dynamics in an all-optical system. In our model the information is initially localized in the memory and evolves under the combined actions of many-body interactions and dissipation. We find that the information is scrambled if the memory and environmental particles are alternatively squeezed along two directions which are perpendicular to each other. Moreover, the disorder and imperfection of the interaction strength tend to prevent the information flow away to the environment and lead to the information scrambling in the memory. We analyze the spatial distributions of the correlations in the memory. Our proposal is possible to realize with current experimental techniques.