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Monday 25 May

Quantum Physics · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Phantom Transitions in Language Model Fine-Tuning: A Density-Matrix Analysis

Language models fine-tuned where the correct completion must outrank a near-synonym competitor often fail silently. The cross-entropy loss falls monotonically while the correct token never overtakes the competitor in the model's ranking. We study this across five transformer architectures from two families spanning a sixfold parameter range, on ten contexts whose correct and competing completions share substantial embedding overlap. We build an order parameter combining the predicted distribution with embedding overlap, as a density matrix because that distribution lives over a non-orthogonal basis. It decomposes additively into a signal term tracking commitment to the correct token and a drag term set by how the embedding bulk leaks probability into the score. This isolates two failure modes. In kinematic failure the signal stays too small and the model never commits. In structural failure the drag worsens during fine-tuning, so the model degrades geometrically as its loss falls. The order parameter also shows sharp jumps resembling phase transitions. We test the spontaneous-symmetry-breaking reading by tracking it after every gradient step, and rule it out. The jumps persist under LoRA even though the token embedding matrix never changes. No geometric phase transition is possible when that geometry cannot move, so the discontinuity lies entirely in the softmax readout. A few dimensionless quantities organize the trajectory across architectures. One is consistent across all five models under full fine-tuning. A second sorts architectures into two classes by their bulk embedding distribution and predicts whether LoRA alone can make a sentence commit. As a blind test, the framework predicts a held-out architecture's critical learning rate to within 2.1% of a later sweep. These results characterize this near-synonym mechanism and need recalibration before extrapolation.
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Quantum Physics · Cross-listed from cond-mat.mes-hall

Dirac-Line Criticality and Emergent Horizons in Weyl Lifshitz Transitions

Type-II Weyl fermions may emerge behind the event horizon of black holes. We employ the Painlevé-Gullstrand metric to study the surface of the Lifshitz transition at the horizon, equivalent to the interface separating the type-I and type-II Weyl states. We find several analogies between the black hole horizon and the transformation of type-I to type-II Weyl fermions through the Dirac line. We analyze the symmetry-protected topological order at the Lifshitz transition originating in semimetals. The emergence of Hawking radiation in Weyl semimetals is discussed. We show that the transition state from type-I to type-II Dirac fermions can be viewed as a black-hole horizon, which exhibits unique characteristics, including a Dirac-line Fermi surface with a nontrivial topological invariant and a critical chiral anomaly effect.
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All authors Iftekher S. Chowdhury, Hom Nath Dhungana, Shah Haque, Hind Adawi, Eric Howard

Quantum Physics

Scar Full Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis

The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) provides a fundamental mechanism for emergent statistical mechanics in isolated chaotic quantum systems, asserting that individual energy eigenstates behave as pseudorandom vectors within an energy window. This enables a complete characterization of nontrivial correlations among matrix elements in the energy eigenbasis, as described by the full ETH ansatz. Nevertheless, this description breaks down in systems exhibiting quantum many-body scars, which host non-thermal eigenstates with extensive energy. In this Letter, we address this problem by formulating the scar full ETH, which captures correlations among matrix elements involving scar states. The corresponding scaling forms and factorization properties are established using typicality arguments. Multi-time correlation functions for scar states are then organized in terms of both thermal and scar cumulants, providing a nontrivial reorganization of higher-order correlations. We numerically demonstrate the validity of this framework in the paradigmatic model of quantum scars, the PXP model. Our results pave the way for a systematic understanding of intriguing correlations in systems with quantum many-body scars.
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Quantum Physics

Single-Ensemble Multiparameter Squeezing with Qudits

Conventional spin squeezing enhances a single sensing channel. Here, we show how internal qudit levels enable simultaneous multiparameter squeezing within one ensemble. In two-component magnetometry, a qutrit sensor provides two orthogonal and weakly compatible channels. A collective twisting interaction squeezes both responses while preserving joint attainability of the ultimate sensitivity. The sensing gain is quantified by using a matrix generalization of the Wineland sensitivity that retains both noise correlations and cross-channel response. An interaction-based echo amplifies the signal to overcome noise from a fixed local joint readout, yielding a simulated $13~\mathrm{dB}$ gain over the product-state standard quantum limit for $N=128$ qutrits. More generally, we use the single-site quantum Fisher information matrix to select reference states and channel quadratures for prescribed sensing tasks. The tangent geometry permits at most $d-1$ independent, weakly compatible channels around a common pure reference state for a $d$-level sensor. Our work provides a constructive task-to-protocol map for multiparameter squeezing in a single qudit ensemble.
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All authors Xiaoshui Lin, Chunlei Qu, Chong Zu, Chuanwei Zhang

Quantum Physics

Bohr's complementarity

Quantum complementarity is a fundamental feature of quantum systems and has captivated the physics research community for nearly a century, with significant advancements emerging in recent decades. This review traces the historical evolution of the concept of complementarity, beginning with Bohr's original formulation. It then explores its modern quantification through complementarity relations and its profound connection to the foundational postulates of quantum theory. Furthermore, it delves into key related developments, such as the operational definition of complementarity in the context of incompatible observables, its potential links with quantum uncertainty relations and contextuality, its various applications, and other pertinent topics. This review aims to serve physicists interested in quantum resources, quantum correlations, and the foundational principles of quantum mechanics.
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All authors Diego S. Starke, Jonas Maziero, Marcos L. W. Basso, Tabish Qureshi

Quantum Physics

Optimal Uncertainty Relations for a Single Observable

Uncertainty relations are usually formulated as trade-offs between two or more observables. Yet the uncertainty of a single observable can already contain an intrinsically quantum contribution arising from its noncommutativity with the state. In the sense of Luo, such a contribution can be quantified by a quantum uncertainty $Q_\rho(A)$, with prominent examples including the Wigner–Yanase and Wigner–Yanase–Dyson skew informations and the quantum Fisher information. Here we ask how strong such single-observable uncertainty relations can be when the quantum state is fixed. We solve this fixed-state optimization problem by determining the largest coefficient $c_{\rm opt}(\rho)$ for which $V_\rho(A)\ge c_{\rm opt}(\rho)Q_\rho(A)$ holds for every observable $A$, and show that it depends only on the smallest and largest eigenvalues of $\rho$. The same optimization principle extends to a new power-commutator family $\frac{1}{2}|[\rho^s,A]|^2$ $(s\ge 1/2)$, providing a direct measure of state–observable noncommutativity beyond the standard quantum-uncertainty framework. More importantly, the optimal noncommutative contribution can be combined with the maximal classical contribution compatible with the state, yielding a sharpened variance decomposition without weakening the optimal bound. For states with exactly two distinct eigenvalues, this relation becomes an identity for every observable; in particular, qubit variances decompose exactly into classical and noncommutative parts. Finally, the corresponding variance-product bounds are no weaker than the Robertson relation for qubit spin observables and can be strictly stronger, showing that a substantial part of the uncertainty usually expressed as a trade-off between distinct observables is already encoded in their individual noncommutativity with the state.
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Quantum Physics · Cross-listed from cond-mat.quant-gas

Extended Bose-Hubbard Model on Small Grids: Exact Diagonalization and Monte Carlo Studies

The superfluid-insulator transition in systems of lattice bosons is usually analyzed in the framework of the Bose-Hubbard model, and has been extensively studied by theory and simulations. Less attention has been paid to the remnants of the transition in truncated lattices, with or without periodic boundary conditions. Here we consider the hard-core limit of the extended Bose-Hubbard model on small square and triangular grids – i.e., sections of the square and triangular lattices containing up to 13 sites. By mapping out the zero-temperature phase diagram through exact diagonalization, we find ground-state characteristics that are markedly different from those emerging in the thermodynamic limit, together with similarities. The dichotomy between superfluid-like and insulating-like behavior is then investigated in two-dimensional systems of a few interacting bosons in the continuum, subject to confining and optical-lattice potentials mimicking the $3\times 3$ square grid. Using path-integral Monte Carlo simulations, we compute kinetic and potential energies, as well as superfluidity and exchange-cycle statistics, finding hints of Bose-Hubbard behavior even in systems of just five particles.
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All authors Gabriele Costa, Matteo Ciardi, Fabio Cinti, Santi Prestipino

Quantum Physics

Kubo-Ando Means and Rigidity of Quantum Positivity Cones

We investigate the stability of quantum positivity cones under nonlinear operator means. Specifically, we examine how Kubo–Ando means interact with the separable, positive partial transpose (PPT), and Schmidt-number cones. By analyzing the curvature of operator monotone functions at the identity, we give a strict rigidity phenomenon: weighted arithmetic means are the only Kubo–Ando means that preserve the separable cone in all dimensions. We show that the strictly positive curvature of any non-arithmetic mean explicitly forces a violation of the PPT condition, even in the foundational two-qubit setting, and can strictly increase the Schmidt number of the resulting operator. Finally, using the Choi–Jamiołkowski correspondence, we translate these geometric obstructions to the map-theoretic setting, concluding that convex mixing is the uniquely permissible Kubo–Ando operation for preserving entanglement-breaking quantum channels.
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Quantum Physics · Cross-listed from hep-th

Krylov Complexity in Periodically Driven CFTs and Critical Fermions

We study Krylov construction in periodically driven conformal field theories and their lattice realisations via critical fermions. Two types of driving are considered: a square-wave drive and a continuous sinusoidal drive. Using the Arnoldi construction, we examine Arnoldi coefficients and return amplitudes in periodically driven conformal field theories in the heating and non-heating phases. In the heating phase, the Arnoldi coefficients approach unity exponentially; in contrast, in the non-heating phase, they exhibit oscillatory behaviour. For the lattice realisations, we further analyse the Krylov complexity of the correlation matrix, quasi energy level statistics, and the graph structure induced by the Floquet operator. Although the two drives exhibit similar Krylov growth on the CFT side, their lattice realisations exhibit markedly different spectral and graph signatures, indicating distinct mechanisms governing the transition between the heating and non-heating phases.
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Quantum Physics

Preparing thermal states of frustrated quantum spin systems using 139 qubits

Finite-temperature properties of strongly correlated quantum matter are central to condensed matter, chemistry, and high-energy physics, yet are often inaccessible to classical methods such as quantum Monte Carlo (QMC). Here, we investigate dissipative thermal state preparation of frustrated spin systems using digital quantum computers. We focus on two paradigmatic models on the kagome lattice: the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model (AFHM), whose finite-temperature properties are inaccessible to QMC due to a severe sign problem, and the antiferromagnetic Ising model (AFIM), which serves as a sign-problem-free benchmark. Using IBM quantum processors, we prepare approximate thermal states of the AFIM on kagome lattices with up to 79 spins coupled to 60 environment qubits. We observe the emergence of a robust steady state with an adjustable effective temperature that persists in circuits with over 1000 layers of two-qubit gates. We further study the scalability of the dissipative protocol through classical statevector simulations of the AFIM and AFHM. On lattices with up to 27 sites, we find that the circuit depth to reach thermal equilibrium is independent of system size and grows at most linearly with inverse temperature. These results establish engineered dissipation as a promising approach to finite-temperature quantum simulation of frustrated matter, and point toward regimes where quantum devices may outperform classical methods.
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All authors Roland C. Farrell, Yongtao Zhan, Lucas Katschke, Lode Pollet, Ilan T. Rosen, Jad C. Halimeh

Quantum Physics

Amplification and generation bounds of gravity-induced entanglement in pulsed optomechanical systems

We investigate gravity-induced entanglement between the output optical fields of two red-detuned pulsed optomechanical systems with their masses coupled by mutual gravitational interaction. For each individual system, the optomechanical interaction realizes a beam-splitter state swap between an incident optical pulse and its mechanical mode. Using two rectangular pulses for each system – the first to imprint a nonclassical state on the mechanical modes and the second to read the gravitationally generated entanglement back onto the outgoing light – we show that the amount of entanglement can be amplified by preparing the input in a squeezed or Fock state. However, the threshold for entanglement generation is set by the competition between the gravitational coupling and thermal decoherence, $g_G>2\gamma_m N_{\rm th}$, and cannot be lowered by any choice of input state. We prove this bound for two-mode Gaussian inputs and show that it continues to hold for Fock-state inputs. We further analyze how imperfect detection modifies the threshold and identify the entanglement-annihilating and entanglement-breaking regimes, which are set by the thermal decoherence accumulated over the interaction time, independent of the gravitational coupling.
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Quantum Physics

Mode-selective excitation in parametrically driven coupled quantum oscillators

A parametrically driven classical harmonic oscillator exhibits resonant instability when driven at twice its natural frequency, with the lowest energy configuration remaining unaffected by the drive. In contrast, the ground state of the quantum mechanical counterpart shows a non-trivial response to such a drive due to the spatial delocalization of the wavefunction. The standard realization of PR involves modulating the natural frequency of the oscillator. Here we study a different drive protocol in which the coupling between two such quantum harmonic oscillators is modulated parametrically. We show that the drive frequency can in principle be tuned to selectively excite any desired normal mode, while leaving the other close to its ground state. Only states with even quantum numbers in each normal mode are populated. Within the parametric resonance window the excitations follow a power-law decay with respect to occupation number, in contrast to the exponential decay observed off-resonance. We also briefly discuss how this framework can be extended to a system of N coupled oscillators
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Quantum Physics

Entanglement Pattern Transition of Quantum States from Directed Percolation

Changes in the entanglement structure and critical phenomena are hallmarks of quantum phase transitions. Here, we discuss how they appear in transitions between classes of states with distinct entanglement patterns beyond the paradigm of stable equilibrium phases of matter. Using a mapping between stochastic automata and isometric Tensor Network States (isoTNS), we construct a two-dimensional quantum state from the Domany-Kinzel automaton, which is a (1+1)D process with an absorbing phase transition in the directed percolation class. At the critical point of the automaton, the corresponding isoTNS hosts algebraic correlations in all spatial directions. The continuous parent Hamiltonian of this state has a degenerate ground state manifold. It consists of a product state (the absorbing state) and a second state that undergoes a transition from pairwise entanglement between distant regions, similarly to the W state, to a state with trivial entanglement. Our results demonstrate how the correspondence between isoTNS and classical stochastic evolution can be used to probe the Hilbert space structure beyond stable ground state manifolds.
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Quantum Physics

Practical Tests and Witnesses of Fermionic non-Gaussianity

Fermionic Gaussian states describe free fermions and underlie the mean-field picture of matter, from metals to superconductors; they are also efficiently simulable on classical computers. Departures from Gaussianity – the correlations produced by interactions – are therefore what make a fermionic system hard to simulate classically and useful for quantum computation, analogous to the role of magic in stabilizer-based quantum computation. Yet detecting and quantifying such non-Gaussianity at scale has remained challenging. Here we introduce practical tests and witnesses of fermionic non-Gaussianity built on fermionic antiflatness, a measure derived from the two-point covariance matrix. We estimate it with two protocols – a two-copy Bell measurement and a single-copy scheme using commuting Majorana bilinears – that determine whether a state is Gaussian or far from it at lower measurement cost than existing approaches, using only operations native to fault-tolerant hardware. For mixed states, a purity-corrected witness certifies non-Gaussianity and remains robust under strong noise; running it on the IQM quantum processor, we find that noise can both reduce and enhance non-Gaussianity. Finally, we show that preparing pseudorandom fermionic states requires extensive non-Gaussianity. Together, these tools enable the study and certification of non-Gaussian fermionic resources on present-day quantum devices.
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Quantum Physics

Universal Bound for Entanglement Generation

We derive a universal condition for entanglement generation under general bilinear interactions in the presence of white thermal noise. While various protocols have been proposed to enhance the amount of generated entanglement, it remains unclear whether they can also relax the threshold for entanglement generation itself. Using a Gorini-Kossakowski-Sudarshan-Lindblad description, we analyze general multimode systems and derive a separability-preserving condition for bilinear interactions under white thermal noise. As an application to gravity-induced entanglement, we show that the gravitational interaction must dominate over thermal noise for entanglement to arise. In particular, this bound cannot be relaxed by changing the initial state or by introducing mediator systems, although such ingredients may enhance the amount of entanglement once it is generated. These results establish a general limitation on entanglement-generation protocols in thermal environments.
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Quantum Physics · Cross-listed from gr-qc

Trade-off Relation for Black Hole Entropy Fluctuations

Black holes respond to infalling quantum matter fields by changing their entropy. Since such matter is quantum in nature, the entropy response should be sensitive to its quantum fluctuations. We show, within stochastic semiclassical gravity, that a horizon cannot record relevant quantum information with arbitrarily small entropy fluctuations. For the infalling photons encoding which-path information in the Danielson-Satishchandran-Wald decoherence experiment, we derive a trade-off relation between the stochastic variance of the black hole entropy change and the photon number.
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Quantum Physics

Mapping twist fields to local operators via tensor networks

Twist fields are a powerful formal tool to compute Rényi entropies in quantum many-body systems, but their conventional formulation in tensor network states involves operations acting on virtual degrees of freedom, which are not directly accessible in experiments. In this work, we construct explicit local operators acting on the physical Hilbert space whose expectation values reproduce the action of twist fields in matrix product states. Our construction is exact in the injectivity limit and when the tensor is chosen at the center of orthogonality, and provides a direct operational method to evaluate Rényi entropies without accessing auxiliary tensor indices. We test our formulation numerically in the transverse-field Ising model, demonstrating rapid convergence to the exact entanglement entropy as the injectivity scale is reached. Furthermore, we show that twist operators determined from relatively small reference systems can be reliably transferred to larger systems, once the reference size exceeds a characteristic scale set by the correlation length. Since the resulting operators admit a decomposition in terms of a finite number of local observables, our results provide a scalable and experimentally accessible framework to probe entanglement in quantum simulators.
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All authors Andrea Bulgarelli, Marco Panero, Paolo Stornati, Luca Tagliacozzo

Quantum Physics

Exact strong zero modes are generic in integrable spin systems with large anisotropy

Strong zero modes (SZMs) are edge-localized operators that commute with the Hamiltonian up to corrections exponentially small in system size, yielding anomalously long edge coherence times. In some settings, notably certain integrable models, this commutator can be made to vanish exactly at finite size, defining an exact SZM (ESZM). Existing ESZM constructions in the integrable setting, however, have proceeded model by model and have not been unified into a common framework. Here, I show that ESZMs arise generically in a broad family of integrable spin models with anisotropic interactions. Their existence follows from two algebraic properties of the underlying R- and K-matrices – quasi-periodicity in the spectral parameter and tracelessness, respectively – providing a uniform, model-independent mechanism. The framework recovers the known ESZM in XXZ chain and its higher-spin generalizations as special cases and predicts ESZMs in previously unrecognized models.
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Quantum Physics

Rounding Almost Commuting Hamiltonians

Commuting Hamiltonians lie at the boundary between classical constraint satisfaction and quantum many-body physics, exhibiting rich quantum structure while remaining more tractable than general noncommuting models. In contrast, physical Hamiltonians are rarely exactly commuting, which naturally motivates the study of almost commuting Hamiltonians. Despite their relevance, the implications of approximate commutation are only poorly understood. In this work, we show how to efficiently approximate any almost commuting $2$-local qubit Hamiltonian by a commuting one: we give a new locality-preserving algorithmic rounding technique that maps any $2$-local Hamiltonian $H=\sum_{i=1}^m h_i$ with $\|[h_i,h_j]\| \leq \epsilon$ to a nearby Hamiltonian $\hat{H}$ whose terms pair-wise commute, and which is within overall distance $\|H-\hat{H}\| = O(m\,\epsilon^{1/3})$. As a consequence, we show that $\delta$-approximations to the ground energy for $\epsilon$-almost commuting $2$-local qubit Hamiltonians lie in $\mathsf{NP}$ when $\delta \gg m\epsilon^{1/3}$, extending the classical containment well beyond the commuting setting. Finally, we present two applications of our rounding framework: Gibbs sampling and fast Hamiltonian simulation for almost commuting systems.
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Quantum Physics · Cross-listed from math.NA

Quantum Domain Decomposition for Preconditioning the Finite Element Method

Even in cases where quantum linear solvers provide significant speedup compared to their classical counterparts, their performance depends on some of the same parameters. In particular, the condition number of the matrix which is to be inverted is a decisive parameter. A well known classical, and now quantum, remedy is to precondition the linear system $A x = b$ by premultiplying it by a matrix $H$ in such a way that the condition number of $HA$ is significantly smaller than the condition number of $A$. In this work, we focus on a family of preconditioners called domain decomposition. First, we prove that it is feasible to apply quantum domain decomposition. We provide upper bounds for the block-encoding parameters of the Poisson problem discretized by the finite element method and preconditioned by the two-level Additive Schwarz preconditioner (one of the most fundamental domain decomposition techniques). From these bounds, we deduce the complexity of the quantum linear system solver. Second, we focus on a particular choice of local solver within the domain decomposition preconditioner by applying recent work by [Deiml and Peterseim, Math. Comput., 2025] on the Bramble–Pasciak–Xu (BPX) preconditioner. Finally, we provide details on how the operators are implemented.
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Quantum Physics · Cross-listed from hep-th

Krylov Complexity for Plane Wave Matrix Model

We study Krylov complexity in BMN Plane Wave Matrix Model at large mass deformation. We consider various consistent reductions of the matrix model that allow us to perform a Hamiltonian analysis which leads to different notions of the Krylov complexity. In the first part of the paper, we study the Krylov state complexity considering systematic reduction of $N=3$ and $N=4$ representations of the matrix model, which reveals a universal characteristic scaling for the Lanczos coefficients and fix them completely in terms of the mass deformation parameter. In the second part of the paper, we study the Krylov operator growth in the matrix model and compute the corresponding Lanczos coefficients. In both cases, we observe a linear scaling of Lanczos coefficients with the mass parameter. The early time growth in Krylov complexity receives quadratic correction due to the presence of the massive deformation in the matrix model. Our analysis reveals that such massive corrections appear at same order in time for both the notion of the Krylov complexity.
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Quantum Physics

Asymptotically Optimal Depth Fermionic Permutation on 2D Grid Quantum Architecture without Ancillas

Simulating fermionic systems on qubit hardware involves many nonlocal interactions, and efficient routing of these interactions is critical to the overall cost of fermionic simulation algorithms. Recent works reduce this routing overhead to polylogarithmic depth under all-to-all connectivity, but degrade to $O(\sqrt{N}\log N)$ for $N$ fermionic modes on 2D nearest-neighbor architectures. We present a fermionic permutation protocol tailored to 2D grid architectures that achieves the optimal $O(\sqrt{N})$ depth with $O(N\sqrt{N})$ nearest-neighbor gates and no ancilla qubits, measurements, or classical feedforward. For $N=L^2$ modes, the CNOT depth is at most $10L+12$. This matches the $\Omega(\sqrt{N})$ lower bound, which holds even when $O(N)$ ancillas and classical feedforward are permitted. We further construct an $O(\sqrt{N})$-depth transformation between the Jordan–Wigner, Bravyi–Kitaev, and Parity encodings on the 2D grid via a Hilbert-curve layout, extending our result to all three encodings. Benchmarks on a standalone fermionic permutation circuit, the fermionic fast Fourier transform, and Trotter simulation of a sparse SYK model demonstrate that the practical crossover is near the analytical depth-bound breakeven at $L=6$ ($N=36$), followed by consistent reductions in circuit depth and spacetime volume and higher estimated no-fault probability in the early fault-tolerant regime, growing with system size.
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Quantum Physics

Toward General Quantum Control with Physics-Informed Large Language Models

Quantum control is essential for quantum information science and technology, yet designing high-fidelity control protocols remains challenging due to complex optimization landscapes, hardware noise, and long pulse sequences. Existing numerical solvers often require problem-specific engineering and produce opaque control amplitudes, while naive large language models (LLMs) lack the physical consistency and long-horizon precision for reliable quantum control synthesis. Here we introduce VF-QCTRL, a physics-informed large language model framework for general quantum control that combines symbolic reasoning with optimization to propose analytic control ansätze and coherently refine their parameters through feedback. To systematically evaluate LLM-driven quantum control, we develop QCTRL-BENCH, a benchmark spanning sixteen tasks across single- and multi-qubit systems, closed and open quantum dynamics, noiseless and noisy settings, and both analytic and numerical protocols. Across the benchmark, VF-QCTRL demonstrates strong universality, accuracy, efficiency, and interpretability: it applies to generic quantum control systems without task-specific training, achieves performance competitive with or exceeding state-of-the-art conventional solvers in both noiseless and noisy regimes with query efficiency, exhibits favorable inference-time scaling and pulse resolution scaling, and derives physically interpretable analytical protocols directly from prompts. Our results establish physics-informed LLM-based quantum control as a promising paradigm for accurate, efficient, interpretable, and training-free quantum control protocol design across a broad range of quantum systems.
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All authors Yusheng Zhao, Han Wang, Xin Liu, Xinjie Song, Jixi He, Lingwei Song, Yuanhe Ji, Ken Deng, Runqing Zhang, Zhiguo Huang, Ling Qian, Jize Han, Di Luo

Quantum Physics

Training-Free Quantum Generative Paradigm via Local Parent Hamiltonians

We propose a training-free quantum generative paradigm, which is fundamentally different from current generative models, which demand substantial computational power, face practical scalability limits, and often function as opaque black boxes, despite their remarkable success. We enable image and text generation without parameter training, by constructing a local parent Hamiltonian whose ground state encodes the target distribution and then solving the global Hamiltonian. Rooted directly in quantum mechanical principles, this approach establishes a new pathway for generative modeling that leverages superposition and entanglement to maintain global consistency.
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All authors Shu Tian, Jiaqi Hu, Rebing Wu, Yu Shi

Quantum Physics

Evaluating System-Level Fidelity with Peaked Random Circuits

Quantum computing is progressing beyond experimental prototypes toward cloud-based services and commercially deployed turnkey systems. Evaluating and comparing platform performance requires robust, standardized measures, yet vendors frequently report heterogeneous metrics that are not directly comparable or may not capture whole-system performance. Peaked Random Circuits (PRCs) have recently been proposed as a viable path to demonstrate quantum advantage: a quantum processor can reliably identify a single known high-probability outcome while the circuits' inherent complexity may render classical simulation infeasible. To support robust, system-level evaluation and comparison, we propose a novel benchmarking protocol based on PRCs. By successively running a set of PRCs with varying qubit counts and circuit depths, we quantify a system's ability to identify the deterministic peak despite cumulative noise, gate errors, and connectivity constraints. We demonstrate the benchmark experimentally on IQM's superconducting and AQT's trapped-ion architectures. Our results show that the PRC benchmark provides a holistic yet high-precision view of hardware performance and offers researchers and industry stakeholders a practical and scalable framework for the continuous comparison and evaluation of current and future quantum systems.
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All authors Martin Brieger, Florian Krötz, Minh Chung, Dieter Kranzlmüller

Quantum Physics

PauLIB: HPC Strategies for Pauli-Arithmetic-Based Quantum Computing Workloads and Simulations

As quantum devices become accelerators within classical HPC deployments, the efficiency of the classical partition becomes critical. Workloads such as Hamiltonian manipulation, observable backpropagation, and Pauli-based compilation reduce to bulk arithmetic on Pauli strings and sums. We present HPC strategies for this arithmetic, demonstrated in PauLIB, a header-only C++20 library: a bit-packed binary symplectic representation reducing Pauli multiplication to a bitwise XOR and population count; a sorted, struct-of-arrays layout replacing hash maps and exposing contiguous word arrays to SIMD units and GPU warps; and deterministic OpenMP parallelism with race-free output partitioning. These strategies deliver orders-of-magnitude higher throughput and smaller memory footprint than Qiskit and PauliEngine, plus a speedup from a CUDA outer-product kernel on an H100. Two case studies, g-sim and truncated Pauli propagation, inherit these gains and scale unchanged from a desktop Arm CPU to a 72-core HPC Arm server. PauLIB is open source with C++ and Python interfaces.
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Quantum Physics

Unified Flux Control Architecture for Fluxonium Qubits

Control architectures that reduce hardware overhead while maintaining high-fidelity operations are essential for the continued scaling of superconducting quantum processors. Here we experimentally realize a unified control architecture for fluxonium qubits, in which both transverse ($XY$) and longitudinal ($Z$) operations are implemented through a single flux-control channel driven by a single arbitrary waveform generator channel. This architecture imposes competing requirements on the shared control channel, which must simultaneously support low-frequency flux transmission for reset operations while strongly attenuating broadband noise near the qubit transition frequency. We address this challenge through frequency-selective cryogenic filtering together with compensated waveform synthesis that corrects the pulse distortion introduced by the filtered control line. Experimentally, this approach preserves coherence times above 100 $\mu$s while enabling active reset with approximately 98% fidelity and 20-ns single-qubit gates with fidelities exceeding 99.99%. We further demonstrate FPGA-native instruction-level waveform synthesis based on reusable pulse primitives for unified flux control. These results establish unified flux control as a scalable architecture for fluxonium qubits that reduces control hardware overhead while preserving high-fidelity operation.
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All authors Xianchuang Pan, Jiahui Wang, Tao Zhou, Yanbo Guo, Fei Wang, Ze Zhan, Liang Xiang, Zishuo Li, Lu Ma, Xizheng Ma, Huijuan Zhan, Tao Zhang, Kannan Lu, Xing Zhu, Guicheng Gong, Chunqing Deng, Tenghui Wang

Quantum Physics · Cross-listed from gr-qc

Generalising gravitationally induced decoherence beyond linear environmental interactions in a microscopic quantum mechanical toy model

We generalise the quantum mechanical toy model for gravitationally induced decoherence presented in Xu, Blencowe (2022) and Domi et al. (2024). In contrast to earlier formulations, in which the Hamiltonian of the system of interest is linearly coupled to the position operators of the oscillators in the environment, we consider an interaction formulated in terms of Weyl elements of the environment's position operators. This extension is motivated by polymer quantum mechanics, in which Weyl elements are fundamental operators, as well as by the possibility of generating non-linear interactions through suitable truncations of the exponential Weyl elements. Here we focus on a sinus-like coupling that is still quantised using the Schrödinger representation and, in the limit of a small Weyl parameter, reproduces the conventional linear interaction. To derive the corresponding master equation, we developed two complementary methods for the analytical calculation of the environmental correlation functions. The first utilises Wick's theorem for thermal expectation values in conjunction with annihilation and creation operators, while the second is based on the short-time Fourier transform and completely avoids the use of annihilation and creation operators, making it more readily transferable and generalisable to a polymer quantisation. Both approaches yield identical results. We further generalise the spectral density required for the exponential coupling structure. A numerical analysis shows that the environmental correlation functions decay rapidly with time, which supports the validity of the Markov approximation. Using a Taylor expansion in the Weyl parameter, we show that the first-order term reproduces the decoherence model of Xu, Blencowe (2022) and Domi et al. (2024). Finally, we derive the solution to the renormalised master equation.
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All authors Max Joseph Fahn, Renata Ferrero, Kristina Giesel, Roman Kemper

Quantum Physics

Native topological readout on qubit hardware: a Fibonacci-chain benchmark of measurement-compilation trade-offs

Recent demonstrations of non-Abelian braiding of graph vertices on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) superconducting processor, and the experimental realization of topological order in general on various quantum hardware platforms necessitate an important question: when does a native (topological) fusion readout genuinely help for topological anyonic Hamiltonians implemented on NISQ hardware? We use the Fibonacci anyons chain as a concrete model for understanding the trade-off between measurement cost and compilation cost in that setting. The comparison is made against a simple grouped-Pauli baseline, and is scored by a covariance-aware mean-squared-error (MSE) of the full energy estimator. We based our benchmark on two different important classes of quantum circuits, namely Floquet time-evolved and variational quantum eigensolver quantum circuits, with the underlying Hamiltonian consisting of both braiding and fusion interaction. Our analysis found that there is not a uniform best method across both problems: the fusion readout method performed better on Floquet-type circuits on both the MSE and covariance-aware sampling variance, while the grouped Pauli method performed better on VQE on the MSE but worse on sampling variance. We derive scaling laws, and compute shot-budget crossover points, where one method is operationally favored above the other. The relevance of this work extends beyond Fibonacci chains to two-dimensional topological models compiled on superconducting and other qubit-native platforms, and can be used as a guide in answering the question of when one should measure in the native operator basis of the target physics, or when it is better to fall back on Pauli-basis reconstruction.
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Quantum Physics

Implementation of distillation protocols using a recirculating bricks mesh network

General-purpose programmable photonic processors provide a flexible foundation for integrating various functionalities within a single chip. A two-dimensional bricks waveguide mesh of Mach Zehnder interferometers has been demonstrated to possess considerable potential in the domain of photonic neural networks and quantum signal processing. In this article, we propose an expansion of the available applications of recirculating bricks mesh architecture to distillation protocols necessary for quantum signal processing. These protocols are essential for the heralding of the output of single photons, which is characterized by a reduced distinguishability error rate. The demonstration will be made of a single programmable optical system's ability to realize various distillation protocols with reduced computational resource costs. The present study will concentrate on cascaded quantum interferometers and Fourier transform-based schemes. It will demonstrate that the bricks mesh can implement such schemes, which are unattainable using feed-forward networks, without the need for complex out-of-plane integration. The propagation of the signal in any direction, along with the utilization of all ports as both input and output, facilitates the execution of such transformations with minimal optical depth of the circuit and in time scales shorter than the decoherence time.
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