Papers

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are promising tools for demonstrating quantum utility on near-term quantum hardware, with applications in optimisation, quantum simulation, and machine learning. While researchers have studied how easy VQAs are to train, the effect of quantum noise on the classical optimisation process is still not well understood. Contrary to expectations, we find that twirling, which is commonly used in standard error-mitigation strategies to symmetrise noise, actually degrades performance in the variational setting, whereas preserving biased or non-unital noise can help classical optimisers find better solutions. Analytically, we study a universal quantum regression model and demonstrate that relatively uniform Pauli channels suppress gradient magnitudes and reduce expressivity, making optimisation more difficult. Conversely, asymmetric noise such as amplitude damping or biased Pauli channels introduces directional bias that can be exploited during optimisation. Numerical experiments on a variational eigensolver for the transverse-field Ising model confirm that non-unital noise yields lower-energy states compared to twirled noise. Finally, we show that coherent errors are fully mitigated by re-parameterisation. These findings challenge conventional noise-mitigation strategies and suggest that preserving noise biases may enhance VQA performance.

Photonic systems with exceptional points, where eigenvalues and corresponding eigenstates coalesce, have attracted interest due to their topological features and enhanced sensitivity to external perturbations. Non-Hermitian mode-coupling matrices provide a tractable analytic framework to model gain, loss, and chirality across optical, electronic, and mechanical platforms without the complexity of full open-system dynamics. Exceptional points define their spectral topology, and enable applications in mode control, amplification, and sensing. Yet $N$-mode couplers, the minimal setting for $N$th-order exceptional points, are often studied in specific designs that overlook their algebraic structure. We introduce a general $\mathrm{sl}(N,\mathbb{C})$ framework for arbitrary $N$-mode couplers in classical and quantum regimes, and develop it explicitly for $N=3$. This case admits algebraic diagonalization, where a propagation-dependent gauge aligns local and dynamical spectra and reveals the geometric phase connecting adiabatic and exact propagation. An exact Wei–Norman propagator captures the full dynamics and makes crossing exceptional points explicit. Our framework enables classification of coupler families. We study the family spanning $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric and non-Hermitian cyclic couplers, where two exceptional points of order three lie within a continuum of exceptional points of order two, ruling out pure encircling. As an application, we study these exceptional points for a lossy three-leg beam splitter and reveal its propagation dynamics as a function of initial states, such as Fock and NOON states. Our approach provides a systematic route to analyze non-Hermitian mode couplers and guide design in classical and quantum platforms.

Surface acoustic waves (SAWs), as Rayleigh waves generated by elastic media, have been used in gyroscopes for over 40 years due to their unique propagation characteristics. However, their working principle, based on Coriolis effects, has become increasingly ineffective for addressing modern sensing challenges in complex scenarios. Fortunately, recent advancements in quantized SAWs offer a promising solution: SAWs operating at extremely low pump powers (approximately at the single-phonon level) can exhibit substantial quantum coherence, enabling investigations into the fundamental limits of SAW gyroscopes as constrained by the Heisenberg uncertainty relation. In particular, when multiple SAWs couple to a common waveguide at distinct locations, the nonlocality arising from the spatial separation among coupling points induces directional coupling between the SAWs. To elucidate this directionality, we propose a quantum gyroscope characterized by multiplepoint couplings. Unlike traditional single-point coupling designs, our gyroscope exhibits distinctive time-delayed dynamics that depend on the system's topologies. We emphasize that these dynamics invalidate the Markovian approximation, even when the time delay is relatively small. Through a comprehensive analysis of all possible topologies, we observe that the directional coupling implies an inherent nonreciprocal transfer. This nonreciprocity confers signiffcant advantages to our gyroscope compared to traditional designs, notably enhancing both the signal-to-noise ratio and sensitivity. Speciffcally, it enables the extraction of output signals that would otherwise be obscured by noise. Consequently, our ffndings suggest that systems with multiple-point couplings and the associated nonreciprocity can serve as valuable resources for advancing quantum sensing technologies.

Energy-efficient AI should be evaluated across the full application pipeline, not only by lowest error or shortest training time. We study this through nonlinear time-series forecasting using simulated quantum reservoir computing (QRC) as an emerging-computing case study. Our evaluation spans 33 forecasting configurations and 825 completed runs on NARMA-10, NARMA-20, Mackey–Glass, Lorenz-63, and Santa Fe laser data. The core benchmark includes 775 fully instrumented runs across statistical, linear, reservoir, neural, continuous-variable Gaussian QRC, and gate-based statevector QRC models, with 50 additional variational QNN runs extending the trainable-quantum comparison. We measure NRMSE, RMSE, MAE, wall time, inference latency, peak CPU/GPU memory, parameter count, operational energy, and carbon. Since a fixed QRC encoder can generate reusable features for multiple readouts, we report both cold-start and amortized costs. We also use a Sustainable Forecasting Score (SFS), a diagnostic geometric mean of normalized predictive skill and log-scaled carbon efficiency, while retaining raw measurements and Pareto analyses. The best mean NRMSE is achieved by continuous-variable QRC with a Transformer readout (0.332), followed closely by classical TCN (0.341) and QRC+TCN (0.340). However, ESN and ridge-lag deliver the strongest sustained efficiency, with average amortized carbon of 0.014 and 0.012 gCO2 per run and SFS values of 0.814 and 0.805. Larger QRC feature maps increase cost without improving average accuracy, while gate-based statevector simulation is not competitive. These results support three practices for emerging AI systems: expose stage-level energy, use reuse-aware accounting boundaries, and co-design the feature generator or accelerator with the classical readout.

Clifford gates and transformations, which map products of elementary Pauli or Majorana operators to other such products, are foundational in quantum computing, underpinning the stabilizer formalism, error-correcting codes, magic state distillation, quantum communication and cryptography, and qubit tapering. Moreover, circuits composed entirely of Clifford gates are classically simulatable, highlighting their computational significance. In this work, we extend the concept of Clifford transformations to fermionic systems. We demonstrate that fermionic Clifford transformations are generated by half-body and pair operators, providing a systematic framework for their characterization. Additionally, we establish connections with fermionic mean-field theories and applications in qubit tapering, offering insights into their broader implications in quantum computing.

We investigate the quantum statistical properties of the confining string connecting a static fermion-antifermion pair in the massive Schwinger model. By analyzing the reduced density matrix of the subsystem located in between the fermion and antifermion, we demonstrate that as the interfermion separation approaches the string-breaking distance, the overlap between the microscopic density matrix and an effective thermal density matrix exhibits a pronounced, narrow peak, approaching unity at the onset of string breaking. This behavior reveals that the confining flux tube evolves toward a genuinely thermal state as the separation between the charges grows, even in the absence of an external heat bath. In other words, one cannot tell whether a reduced state of the subsystem arises from a surrounding heat bath or from entanglement with the rest of the system. The entanglement spectrum near the critical string-breaking distance exhibits a rapid transition from the dominance of a single state describing the confining electric string towards a strongly entangled state containing virtual fermion-antifermion pairs. Our findings establish a quantitative link between confinement, entanglement, and emergent thermality, and suggest that string breaking corresponds to a microscopic thermalization transition within the flux tube.

We demonstrate the non-spreading behavior of Airy wave packets utilizing the Feynman path integral formulation of a linear potential, the Airy functions' zeros correspondence to heavy-meson mass spectroscopy, and their implications to the eigenstates of ultra-cold neutrons in Earth's gravitational field. We derive the linear kernel, and utilize the Feynman path integral time evolution to show that Airy function wave packets are non-dispersive in free space. We then model the confining contribution to 1S - 2S heavy meson mass gaps as a 1+1D absolute linear potential and look at the correspondence of the Airy function zeros. In doing so, we predicted the confining contribution to the mass gap of heavy mesons with a good accuracy when compared to calculations performed in the light front. Furthermore, we used these Airy function solutions to model the quantum states of a neutron under Earth's gravity. We show that the measured heights of a neutron can be modeled by the zeros of the Airy function, and compare to experimental data and predictions utilizing the WKB approximation.

Efficient single-photon emitters are desirable for quantum technologies including quantum networks and photonic quantum computers. We investigate the T centre, a telecommunications-band emitter in silicon, and find a strong isotope dependence of its excited-state lifetime. In particular, the lifetime of the deuterium T centre is over five times longer than the common protium variant. Through explicit first-principles calculations, we demonstrate that this dramatic difference is due to a reduction in the carbon-hydrogen local vibrational mode energy, which suppresses non-radiative decay. Our results imply that the deuterium T centre approaches unit quantum efficiency, enabling more efficient single-photon sources, quantum memories, and entanglement generation.

Theoretical studies and experiments in the last six years have revealed the potential for novel behaviours and functionalities in device physics through the synthetic engineering of negatively-curved spaces. For instance, recent developments in hyperbolic band theory have unveiled the emergence of higher-dimensional eigenstates – features fundamentally absent in conventional Euclidean systems. At the same time, superconducting quantum circuits have emerged as a leading platform for quantum analogue emulations and digital simulations in scalable architectures. Here, we introduce a scalable superconducting circuit framework for the analogue quantum emulation of tight-binding models on hyperbolic and kagome-like lattices. Using this approach, we experimentally realize three distinct lattices, including, for the first time to our knowledge, a hyperbolic lattice whose unit cell resides on a genus-3 Riemann surface. Our method encodes the hyperbolic metric directly into capacitive couplings between high-quality superconducting resonators, enabling tenable reproduction of spectral and localization properties while overcoming major scalability and spectral resolution limitations of previous designs. These results set the stage for large-scale experimental studies of hyperbolic materials in condensed matter physics and lay the groundwork for realizing hyperbolic quantum processors, with potential implications for both fundamental physics and quantum computing

We study magnetometry of gradients and homogeneous background fields along the three orthogonal directions using two spatially separated spin ensembles. We derive trade-off relations for the achievable estimation precision of these parameters. Dicke states, optimal for homogeneous field estimation, can be locally rotated into states sensitive to magnetic gradients by rotating the spins in one subensemble. We determine bounds for the precision for gradient metrology in the three orthogonal directions as a function of the sensitivities to the homogenous field in those directions. The resulting partially flipped Dicke state saturates the bounds above, showing similar sensitivity in two directions but significantly reduced sensitivity in the third. Exploiting entanglement between the two ensembles, this state achieves roughly twice the precision attainable by the best bipartite separable state, which is a product of local Dicke states. For small ensembles, we explicitly identify measurement operators saturating the quantum Cramér-Rao bound, while for larger ensembles, we propose simpler but suboptimal schemes. In both cases, the gradient is estimated from second moments and correlations of angular momentum operators. Our results demonstrate how the metrological properties of Dicke states can be exploited for quantum-enhanced multiparameter estimation.

Decoders of quantum error correction (QEC) experiments make decisions based on detected errors and the expected rates of error events, which together comprise a detector error model. Here we show that the syndrome history of QEC experiments is sufficient to detect and estimate coherent errors, removing the need for prior device benchmarking experiments. Importantly, our method shows that experimentally determined detector error models work equally well for both stochastic and coherent noise regimes. We model fully-coherent or fully-stochastic noise for repetition and surface codes and for various phenomenological and circuit-level noise scenarios, by employing Majorana and Monte Carlo simulators. We capture the interference of coherent errors, which appears as enhanced or suppressed physical error rates compared to the stochastic case, and also observe hyperedges that do not appear in the corresponding Pauli-twirled models. Finally, we decode the detector error models undergoing coherent noise and find different thresholds compared to detector error models built based on the stochastic noise assumption.

Harnessing topological effects offers a route to protect quantum states of light from imperfections, potentially enabling more robust platforms for quantum information processing. This capability is particularly relevant for active photonic circuits that generate quantum light directly on-chip. However, the impact of topology on the spectral properties of parametric processes, crucial for scalable quantum photonic circuits, remains largely unexplored. Here, we address this question by investigating photon-pair generation via spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) in nonlinear waveguide arrays, combining experiment and theory. A systematic comparison of uniform, trivial, and topological Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) arrays reveals that only the topological configuration preserves a stable SPDC resonance spectrum under coupling disorder, with fluctuations in the resonance wavelength reduced by more than an order of magnitude. An analytical model captures the origin of this robustness in the band-structure properties of the interacting modes. Numerical analysis further shows that each SSH array can operate as a robust photon-pair source, enabling stable interference between multiple such sources and the generation of high-dimensional entangled states with high fidelity. These results establish nonlinear waveguide arrays as a promising platform for harnessing the interplay of topology and nonlinearity in quantum photonic circuits.

We study superselection sectors in two-dimensional quantum spin systems with an on-site action of a compact abelian group $G$. Naaijkens and Ogata (2022) arXiv:2102.07707 showed that for states quasi-equivalent to a product state, the superselection structure is trivial, reflecting the absence of long-range entanglement. We consider a symmetry-compatible refinement of this setting, in which both the superselection criterion and the notion of equivalence between representations are required to respect the $G$-action. Under this stricter notion of equivalence, the sector structure for a $G$-equivariant product representation becomes nontrivial: the $G$-equivariant superselection sectors are classified by elements of the Pontryagin dual $\widehat{G}$. This shows that even in phases without long-range entanglement, imposing symmetry compatibility can lead to nontrivial sector structure.

We investigate quantum-information-theoretic observables in electron-proton scattering at the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Our analysis focuses on entanglement and magic, two complementary indicators of non-classicality in quantum states. We show that while unpolarized and longitudinally polarized beams yield unentangled separable outcomes, transverse beam polarization enables the generation of entangled and non-stabilizer states. This result holds for both elastic and deep inelastic electron-proton scattering in QED. In the deep inelastic regime, the degree of quantum correlation is governed by the transversity parton distribution functions, providing a novel perspective on spin dynamics within QCD. These results establish the EIC as a promising environment for generating entangled and non-stabilizer states in high-energy physics, and they highlight opportunities for future lepton-hadron colliders to extend such studies into new kinematic domains.

In this paper, we compute the injective norm - a.k.a. geometric entanglement - of standard basis states of CSS quantum error-correcting codes. The injective norm of a quantum state is a measure of genuine multipartite entanglement. Computing this measure is generically NP-hard. However, it has been computed exactly in condensed-matter theory - notably in the context of topological phases - for the Kitaev code and its extensions, in works by Orús and collaborators. We extend these results to all CSS codes and thereby obtain the injective norm for a nontrivial, infinite family of quantum states. In doing so, we uncover an interesting connection to matroid theory and Edmonds' intersection theorem.

We introduce the resource-theoretic free energy of a quantum channel as the maximal work extractable from the channel as its output equilibrates to a thermal state and its reference system remains locally intact. It is proportional to the relative entropy between the given channel and the absolutely thermal channel. It attains a clear operational meaning as twice the asymptotic rates of athermality distillation and formation under Gibbs preserving superchannels, which map one absolutely thermal channel to another for a given bath, thereby revealing the asymptotic reversibility of the resource theory of athermality for quantum channels. Consequently, we establish that the optimal extractable work in converting one channel to another through the asymptotic athermality distillation and formation tasks equals the difference in their free energies. We call this optimal work the thermodynamic work capacity of channel conversion. Quantum information processing and computing fundamentally concern the manipulation and transformation of quantum channels, which encompass quantum states, their transformations, and measurements. A quantitative characterization of the optimal thermodynamic work gain or expenditure in quantum information processing constitutes a key step toward formulating thermodynamics of quantum processes.

Just how fast does the brickwork circuit form an approximate 2-design? Is there any difference between anticoncentration and being a 2-design? Does geometry matter? How deep a circuit will I need in practice? We tell you everything you always wanted to know about second moments of random quantum circuits, but were too afraid to compute. Our answers generally take the form of numerical results for up to 50 qubits. Our first contribution is a strategy to determine explicitly the optimal experiment which distinguishes any given ensemble from the Haar measure. With this formula and some computational tricks, we are able to compute $t = 2$ multiplicative errors exactly out to modest system sizes. As expected, we see that most families of circuits form $\epsilon$-approximate $2$-designs in depth proportional to $\log n$. For the 1D brickwork, we work out the leading-order constants explicitly. For graphs, we find some exceptions which are much slower, proving that they require at least $\Omega(n^2)$ gates. This answers a question asked by ref. 1 in the negative. We explain these exceptional architectures in terms of connectedness. Based on this intuition we conjecture universal upper and lower bounds for graph-sampled circuit ensembles. For many architectures, the optimal experiment which determines the multiplicative error corresponds exactly to the collision probability (i.e. anticoncentration). However, we find that the star graph anticoncentrates much faster than it forms an $\epsilon$-approximate $2$-design. Finally, we show that one needs only ten to twenty layers to construct an approximate $2$-design for realistic parameter ranges. This is a large constant-factor improvement over previous constructions. The parallel complete-graph architecture is not quite the fastest scrambler, partially resolving a question raised by ref. 2.

We propose an operator generalization of the Li-Haldane conjecture regarding the entanglement Hamiltonian of a disk in a 2+1D chiral gapped groundstate. The logic applies to regions with sharp corners, from which we derive several universal properties regarding corner entanglement. These universal properties follow from a set of locally-checkable conditions on the wavefunction. We also define a quantity $(\mathfrak{c}_{\text{tot}})_{\text{min}}$ that reflects the robustness of corner entanglement contributions, and show that it provides an obstruction to a gapped boundary. One reward from our analysis is that we can construct a local gapped Hamiltonian within the same chiral gapped phase from a given wavefunction; we conjecture that it is closer to the low-energy renormalization group fixed point than the original parent Hamiltonian. Our analysis of corner entanglement reveals the emergence of a universal conformal geometry encoded in the entanglement structure of bulk regions of chiral gapped states that is not visible in topological field theory. Our formalism also gives an explanation of the modular commutator formula for the chiral central charge.

Until very recently, it was generally believed that the (approximate) 2-design property is strictly stronger than anticoncentration of random quantum circuits, mainly because it was shown that the latter anticoncentrate in logarithmic depth, while the former generally need linear depth circuits. This belief was disproven by recent results which show that so-called relative-error approximate unitary designs can, in fact, be generated in logarithmic depth, implying anticoncentration. Their result does however not apply to ordinary local random circuits, a gap which we close in this letter, at least for 2-designs. More precisely, we show that anticoncentration of local random quantum circuits already implies that they form relative-error approximate state 2-designs, making them equivalent properties for these ensembles. Our result holds more generally for any random circuit which is invariant under local (single-qubit) unitaries, independent of the architecture.

We study one dimensional quantum spin chains whose nearest neighbor interactions are random matrices that square to one. By employing free probability theory, we establish a mapping from the many-body quantum dynamics of energy density in the original chain to a single-particle hopping dynamics when the local Hilbert space dimension is large. The hopping occurs on the Cayley graph of an infinite Coxeter reflection group. Adjacency matrices on large finite clusters of this Cayley graph can be constructed numerically by leveraging the automatic structure of the group. The density of states and two-point functions of the local energy density are approximately computed and consistent with the physics of a generic local Hamiltonian: Gaussian density of states and thermalization of energy density. We then ask what happens to the physics if we modify the group on which the hopping dynamics occurs, and conjecture that adding braid relations into the group leads to integrability. Our results put into contact ideas in free probability theory, quantum mechanics of hyperbolic lattices, and the physics of both generic and integrable Hamiltonian dynamics.

At a generic volume- to area-law entanglement transition in a many-body system, quantum chaos is arrested. We argue that this tends to imply the vanishing of a certain "mass" term in the field theory of the measurement-induced phase transition (MIPT) for monitored, interacting fermions. To explore this idea, we consider the MIPT with no conserved quantities that describes 1D monitored, interacting Majorana fermions in class DIII. This is the most general problem of interacting fermions with weak fermion parity measurements. Without interactions, it is known that a noninteracting MIPT separates the area-law phase from a log-enhanced "thermal metal" phase at sufficiently weak monitoring. We conjecture that the MIPT with interactions is the same as the noninteracting one in this case; the volume-law phase arises through the dangerously irrelevant mass. The physical picture is that the mass represents a local Fermi's golden rule interparticle scattering rate density that is tantamount to the entangling rate density. The latter must vanish continuously at a continuous MIPT. On the other hand, the field theory capturing the MIPT for monitored fermions with additional continuous symmetries is expected to be different, because the interactions introduce additional terms associated to conserved Noether currents. We propose numerical tests of our conjecture. In addition, we analytically identify a candidate noninteracting critical point representing the MIPT, using a controlled $\epsilon$-expansion.

An internal symmetry in a lattice model is said to be onsiteable if it can be disentangled into an onsite action by introducing ancillas and conjugating with a finite-depth circuit. A standard lore holds that onsiteability is equivalent to being anomaly-free, which is indeed valid for finite 0-form symmetries in (1+1)D. However, for higher-form symmetries, these notions become inequivalent: a symmetry may be onsite while still anomalous. In this work, we clarify the conditions for onsiteability of higher-form symmetries by proposing an equivalence between onsiteability and the possibility of $higher$ gauging. For a finite 1-form symmetry in (2+1)D, we show that the symmetry is onsiteable if and only if its 't Hooft anomaly satisfies a specific algebraic condition that ensures the symmetry can be 1-gauged. We further demonstrate that onsiteable 1-form symmetry in (2+1)D can always be brought into transversal Pauli operators by ancillas and circuit conjugation. In generic dimensions, we derive necessary conditions for onsiteability using lattice 't Hooft anomaly of higher-form symmetry, and conjecture a general equivalence between onsiteability and possibility of higher gauging on lattices.

A limitation of analog quantum simulators based on cold atoms in optical lattices is that readout is typically limited to observables diagonal in the charge basis, i.e., densities and density correlation functions. To overcome this limitation, we propose experiment-friendly schemes to measure charge-off-diagonal correlations (such as currents). Our protocols use non-interacting dynamics for random times followed by standard quantum gas microscope measurements to effectively measure in random bases. The main requirement of our scheme is the ability to turn off interactions, which can be done in many atomic species using Feshbach resonances. Importantly, our scheme requires no local control and otherwise also exhibits modest requirements in terms of total evolution time and number of repetitions. We numerically demonstrate efficient estimation of bilinear correlation functions, requiring less than $4000$ samples to measure local currents to 5% error (system-size independent) and $\sim 10^4$ samples to simultaneously measure all non-local correlations in 70-site systems. Due to its simplicity, our protocol is implementable in existing platforms and thus paves the way to precision measurements beyond particle number measurements.

We investigate whether Newtonian gravity can generate quantum entanglement between mesoscopic quantum bodies modeled as superposed mass quadrupoles using three complementary approaches: mini-superspace, semiclassical gravity, and stochastic gravity. We systematically analyze gravitationally induced entanglement (GIE) mechanisms and the conditions under which they can arise. Our results support the GIE hypothesis by showing that the mini-superspace framework, which quantizes the parity of the gravitational tidal field, can entangle spatially separate quantum bodies. In contrast, the semiclassical and stochastic gravity models, in which the tidal gravitational field sourced by the quantum bodies remains classical, fail to entangle the final state. These findings clarify recent claims that classical gravity might induce entanglement, and reveal how perturbative treatments can lead to misleading conclusions.

Time-bin encoded photon pairs enable robust, decoherence-resistant transmission through optical fibers for long-distance quantum communication, where phase noise poses a critical limitation to stable operation. Here, we implement an adaptive Perturbation-and-Observe algorithm on a fully digital FPGA platform operating with real-time feedback at 1 Hz. The control signal is derived from the coincidence counts of correlated photon pairs. This adaptive approach reduces the rise time by 70% and the coincidence noise by 30%, resulting in visibility improvements sustained for more than 600 s.These results provide an efficient solution for long-term phase stabilization in quantum and photonic systems.

Evaluating the von Neumann entropy is a central challenge in variational Gibbs-state preparation. We introduce and benchmark matrix-product-state (MPS) assistance for classically evaluating and optimizing the purification circuits without full-statevector storage, examining how circuit architecture affects both thermal-state accuracy and the computational resources required. Comparisons on four- and six-spin transverse-field Ising and XXZ chains reveal complementary strengths: a thermofield-double ansatz performs better at high temperature, whereas a contiguous hardware-efficient ansatz (HEA) performs better on cooling. We identify a layer-dependent entropy ceiling in the contiguous HEA and compare it with an interleaved architecture whose entropy capacity is set solely by the ancilla qubit count. MPS-based benchmarks on 10 x 1, 20 x 1, 3 x 3, and 4 x 4 transverse-field Ising systems show that the tested interleaved circuits generally lower the free-energy errors and improve thermal observables. However, greater entropy capacity and lower free energy do not guarantee improvement in every observable. The architectures also differ in classical cost: contiguous registers permit entropy evaluation at a single MPS bond, whereas the interleaved arrangement requires a dense entropy calculation that scales exponentially with the number of ancillas. These benchmarks connect the accuracy of MPS-assisted Gibbs-state preparation to circuit capacity, optimization, and the tractability of energy and entropy evaluation.

The delayed-choice quantum eraser represents an interesting experiment that exemplifies Bohr's principle of complementarity in a beautiful way. According to the complementarity principle, in a two-path interference experiment, the knowledge of which path was taken by the particle and the appearance of interference are mutually exclusive. Even when the which-path information is merely retained in specific quantum path-markers, without being actually read, it suffices to eliminate interference. Nevertheless, if this path information is “erased” in some manner, the interference re-emerges, a phenomenon referred to as the quantum eraser. An intriguing aspect of this experiment is that if the path information is erased after the particle has been detected on the screen, the interference still reappears, a phenomenon known as the delayed-choice quantum eraser. This observation has led to the interpretation that the particle can be influenced to exhibit characteristics of either a particle or a wave based on a decision made long after it has been registered on the screen. This idea has sparked considerable debate and discussions surrounding retrocausality. This controversy is reviewed here, and a detailed resolution provided.

Trapped ion (TI) qubits are a leading quantum computing platform. Current TI systems have less than 60 qubits, but a modular architecture known as the Quantum Charge-Coupled Device (QCCD) is a promising path to scale up devices. There is a large gap between the error rates of near-term systems ($10^{-3}$ to $10^{-4}$) and the requirements of practical applications (below $10^{-9}$). To bridge this gap, we require Quantum Error Correction (QEC) to build logical qubits that are composed of multiple physical qubits. While logical qubits have been demonstrated on TI qubits, these demonstrations are restricted to small codes and systems. There is no clarity on how QCCD systems should be designed to implement practical-scale QEC. This paper studies how surface codes, a standard QEC scheme, can be implemented efficiently on QCCD-based systems. To examine how architectural parameters of a QCCD system can be tuned for surface codes, we develop a near-optimal topology-aware compilation method that outperforms existing QCCD compilers by an average of 3.8X in terms of logical clock speed. We use this compiler to examine how hardware trap capacity, connectivity and electrode wiring choices can be optimised for surface code implementation. In particular, we demonstrate that small traps of two ions are surprisingly ideal from both a performance-optimal and hardware-efficiency standpoint. This result runs counter to prior intuition that larger traps (20-30 ions) would be preferable, and has the potential to inform design choices for upcoming systems.

Quantum phase transitions in Rydberg atom arrays present significant opportunities for studying many-body physics, yet distinguishing between different ordered phases without explicit order parameters remains challenging. We present a resource-efficient quantum machine learning approach combining classical shadow tomography with variational quantum circuits (VQCs) for binary phase classification of Z2 and Z3 ordered phases. Our pipeline processes 500 randomized measurements per 51-atom chain state, reconstructs shadow operators, performs PCA dimensionality reduction (514 features), and encodes features using angle embedding onto a 2-qubit parameterized circuit. The circuit employs RY-RZ angle encoding, strong entanglement via all-to-all CZ gates, and a minimal 2-parameter ansatz achieving depth 7. Training via simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) with hinge loss converged in 120 iterations. The model achieved 100% test accuracy with perfect precision, recall, and F1 scores, demonstrating that minimal quantum resources suffice for high-accuracy phase classification. This work establishes pathways for quantum-enhanced condensed matter physics on near-term quantum devices.

Bound entanglement, a weak – yet resourceful – form of quantum entanglement, remains notoriously hard to detect and construct. We address this in this paper by leveraging symmetric random induced states, where positive partial transpose (PPT) bound entanglement arises naturally under partial tracing when proper parameters are selected. We investigate the probability of finding PPT bound entanglement in symmetric random induced states constructed via two methods: partial tracing of symmetric multiqubit pure states on the one hand (MI) and tracing out a qudit ancilla on the other hand (MII). For $N > 3$ qubits, we demonstrate that bound entanglement naturally emerges under optimal parameters, with a probability of occurrence very close to 1. We show that the two methods produce different varieties of PPT bound entangled states, and identify the contexts in which each method offers distinct advantages. These methods provide a versatile toolkit for the generation of large families of random PPT bound entangled states without complex numerical optimization.