Papers

Near-term quantum devices are limited by noise and hardware constraints, motivating algorithmic approaches that trade circuit complexity for increased sampling overhead. Quasi-probability decompositions (QPDs), for example, allow replacing non-local operations by multiple circuits with local operations, but the associated sampling overhead generally scales exponentially and limits their practicality. In this work, we introduce a reweighting strategy for QPDs for circuits with the same variational structure across parameter settings, reusing samples and thereby reducing the sampling overhead. We first demonstrate this approach by estimating fidelities between parameterized quantum states, a key primitive in variational time evolution and quantum kernel methods. Importantly, this setup allows controlling the exponential QPD sampling overhead while preserving the structure of the state-encoding ansatz. We then apply the method to estimate the real part of the quantum geometric tensor using the simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation and find that, in the presence of realistic hardware noise, our method outperforms other standard estimation techniques. These results highlight the potential of reweighting strategies to extend the applicability of QPD-based methods in variational quantum algorithms.

Magnetometry with nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond has shown great promise in recent years. In particular, absorption-based magnetometry techniques, employing a cavity to enhance the absorption length, can improve the contrast and sensitivity compared to conventional techniques based on reading out the NV$^-$ triplet fluorescence. The absorption techniques rely on magnetic-field-dependent absorption at the NV$^-$ singlet zero phonon line at 1042$\,$nm and its phonon sideband. In a cavity-enhanced spectroscopy approach, we study pump-laser- and microwave-induced cavity signal changes at room temperature over a spectral range of 680-1050$\,$nm. Through normalization, we eliminate the cavity-enhancement effect and provide quasi-single-pass values for the absorption and optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) contrast. The highest contrast is found at 1042$\,$nm, but multiple points of high contrast are found at the peaks of the phonon sideband. Additionally, cavity-enhanced ODMR contrasts in the range of 50-80$\,\%$ are presented. We further measure the broadband singlet absorption cross section at room temperature with a novel method through microwave-induced signal changes. This method is insensitive to pump-laser-induced signal changes by other defects and quantifies the room-temperature absorption strength of the singlet transition and its entire phonon sideband. We determine the absorption cross section at 1042$\,$nm to be $\sigma^{\,\bigstar}_{1042}=(0.89\pm0.14)\cdot 10^{-21}\,\text{m}^2$ or $\sigma^{\,\blacktriangle}_{1042}=(2.9\pm0.5)\cdot 10^{-21}\,\text{m}^2$. depending on the employed 532$\,$nm NV$^-$ absorption cross section.

Here, we investigate the motion of a thin circular quantum vortex filament near the infinite planar surface. The fluid surrounding this surface moves with a non-zero velocity $\bf{v}$, which is parallel to the surface. We study the specific features of this quantum system and show that they are quite suitable for the boundary layer theory. The developed model allows us to calculate the vortex energy spectrum, $E = E({\bf p})$, where ${\bf p}$ is the total momentum of a vortex ring. We have demonstrated that this function has complex non-trivial dependence on the velocity $\bf{v}$. It is stated that the inverse effective mass of a vortex under consideration is of a tensorial nature. In certain quantum states, the system shows the possibility of both negative and positive effective mass existing. This study employs a novel quantization method for classical closed vortex filaments, developed by the author earlier.

The dynamics of an open quantum system in the high-temperature regime of the Caldeira-Leggett model using a Bohmian language is investigated. By expressing the density matrix in polar form, generalized continuity and Hamilton-Jacobi equations are obtained. Thermal effects appear explicitly in the former, while they influence the latter only indirectly through an effective potential. Remarkably, the effective potential does not vanish in the classical limit and cannot, in general, be decomposed into simple additive quantum and thermal contributions. Instead, it retains a nontrivial structure leading to a residual temperature dependence in the resulting dynamics. As a consequence, the resulting temperature-dependent-classical trajectories remain deterministic even in the presence of a thermal environment. This behavior contrasts with the stochastic dynamics observed in the Langevin description and reflects the ensemble-based nature of the present approach. To further explore the quantum-to-classical transition, a scaled version of the Caldeira-Leggett equation is introduced by scaling both the density matrix and Planck constant through a quantumness parameter. This parameter takes the value one in the fully quantum regime and smoothly approaches zero in the classical limit. Applications to Gaussian states demonstrate a gradual suppression of coherence and interference, governed jointly by thermal effects and the transition parameter.

Bosonic quantum systems provide a hardware-efficient platform for quantum information processing but remain challenging to characterise due to their large Hilbert space and the high measurement cost of state tomography. Existing approaches estimate the fidelity with respect to a single target state, making them unsuitable for applications in which physically equivalent states differ by phase space translations, rotations, or other transformations. Here, we introduce an adaptive reconstruction technique that estimates the fidelity with respect to a family of bosonic states while reconstructing the underlying Wigner function from a small number of measurements. The method combines a physics-informed parametric model with Bayesian inference, bootstrap, and active learning to iteratively select the most informative phase space sampling points. We implement the approach on a circuit quantum electrodynamics platform and benchmark it on Schrödinger cat states with amplitudes $\alpha\in[1,3]$. The reconstruction yields reproducible fidelity estimates within a few minutes, remains robust to substantial displacements and rotations in phase space despite using a mismatched prior, and is sensitive to subtle state imperfections. We further compare the adaptive strategy with existing Wigner function sampling protocols experimentally, demonstrating the advantage of adaptive sampling for measurement-efficient fidelity estimation with respect to a family of cat states. Finally, we incorporate the reconstructed fidelity into the figure of merit used in a proof-of-principle closed-loop quantum optimal control experiment, demonstrating the applicability of the method to autonomous optimisation of bosonic quantum states.

Integrated HPC/QC systems aim to combine classical high-performance computing with quantum processors, but cannot be reduced to mechanisms for dispatching quantum kernels. An integrated architecture must support aspects such as observability, which cannot be implemented using QPUs alone, as well as fallback execution and cost-aware decisions on whether to replace quantum tasks with classical surrogates. Such mechanisms must be approximate or benefit from problem structure to soften the inescapable exponential classical worst-case complexity. In this work, we study tensor-network ground-state search, as such a surrogate, for optimisation problems. This combines key quantum primitives with advanced classical simulation. It provides initial empirical indicators for surrogate selection criteria, and exposes end-to-end toolchain effects that may be missed when transformation steps are studied in isolation. We compare a native polynomial unconstrained optimisation to-higher-order-Ising and a quadratised quadratic unconstrained binary optimization to-quadratic-Ising formulation for Max-3-SAT. Both are encoded as matrix product operator and optimised using density matrix renormalisation group approaches, with simulated annealing (SA) as classical performance baseline. Our results show that quadratisation is not a neutral transformation step: auxiliary variables and pairwise couplings substantially degrade solution quality relative to the native higher-order representation, while SA matches or outperforms DMRG across all tested instances. Since the optima of Boolean satisfiability (SAT)-derived problems are classical product states, DMRGs advantages dont materialise here. These findings suggest that surrogate selection in HPC/QC runtimes must be encoding- and instance-aware and provide empirical groundwork for informed decisions on fallback strategies and architecture co-design.

Recent progress in fully quantum Markov chain Monte Carlo methods enables efficient Gibbs-state sampling on quantum computers [Chen et al., Nature 646, 561 (2025)]. Although rigorous worst-case bounds on mixing times remain largely inaccessible for classically intractable systems, experience from classical Monte Carlo suggests that convergence of relevant observables may nevertheless be rapid. This raises the practical question of how to diagnose convergence efficiently, i.e., with at most polynomial overhead. We propose a low-cost criterion for convergence monitoring that exploits the weak measurements inherent in quantum Gibbs samplers and their qubit-efficient variants [Ding et al., arXiv:2508.05703 (2025)]. Our approach is based on the observation that, at thermal equilibrium, the net energy flow between system and environment vanishes and energy-exchange statistics satisfy a balance condition. This condition appears in the distribution of (quasi-)frequencies extracted from the weak-measurement record and we use it to construct a Hamiltonian-agnostic stopping criterion based solely on data already generated by the sampler. We provide a statistical analysis, along with numerical and analytical studies to understand its performance, assumptions, and limitations.

Fault-tolerant quantum computing requires classical decoders that keep pace with the underlying hardware, translating syndrome measurements into corrections fast enough to avoid an exponential backlog. To meet this real-time constraint, pre-decoders have emerged as part of a hierarchical decoding approach to resolve simple, local errors before passing a sparser residual syndrome to a strong decoder. While pre-decoding should, in theory, speed up the strong decoder, in practice, the speedup is only marginal, since existing strong decoders are designed to decode dense syndromes and cannot exploit the sparsity provided by pre-decoders. To address this, we present Zero-G, a strong decoder designed for use alongside pre-decoders. As a stochastic approximate minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM) decoder, Zero-G exploits sparse residual syndromes, dynamically trading latency for accuracy rather than relying on an all-or-nothing runtime-accuracy trade-off. By decoupling hardware control from the decoding core itself, we enable heterogeneous deployment across both FPGAs and CPUs without maintaining separate implementations. Zero-G achieves a $10\times$ latency improvement over existing strong decoders at matching accuracy, with worst-case sub-350ns decoding at code distances up to d=15, while scaling to 640 logical qubits on a single 128-core CPU and 32 logical qubits on a single AMD Versal V80 FPGA.

Coarse-graining should retain the response to the perturbations and observations of interest. We study this requirement for systems defined by generating operations and observation maps. Equality of all allowed future outputs defines an observation-sufficient quotient; fibre consistency gives differentiable descent for bounded surjective linear maps between Banach spaces. Linearising the state equation and the observation together produces a response whose kernel, source, readout and direct term transform consistently under coarse-graining. We derive an exact comparison identity valid also for noninvertible coarse maps. Eliminating residual states yields a memory representation and, under decay bounds, controlled finite-memory approximations. For isolated critical modes, analytic Fredholm theory gives the pole and visibility conditions; reciprocal realisations with a positive crossing matrix have positive finite-rank residues. An arithmetic merge and a reflecting heat protocol illustrate these results by explicit calculations. Gaussian averaging and quantum-field-theory channels provide further realisations, including the identification of response poles with vacuum spectral atoms under matched spectral hypotheses.

Quantum error correction (QEC) is the most promising route toward fault-tolerant quantum computing and, thus, useful quantum computers. QEC operates as a continuous measure-decode-correct cycle: ancilla qubits are read out, a decoder infers errors from the resulting syndromes, and corrections are applied before the next round begins. Within this loop, readout occupies a uniquely critical role, as it is the sole source of ground truth available to the decoder. Yet readout is also the slowest and most error-prone operation in the stack, with characteristics that vary across qubits and drift over time; This complexity propagates directly to the classical control hardware, and in particular to the FPGA-hosted machine-learning (ML) discriminator that must classify each analog signal into a binary syndrome outcome. Despite this central role, QEC performance has not yet been studied in depth from the perspective of readout characteristics, readout length, and their co-design with an ML discriminator. We introduce Oraqle, an end-to-end benchmarking framework that evaluates qubit-state readout and its impact on QEC performance across real experimentally extracted qubit-state-readout datasets, state-of-the-art ML discriminators, multiple QEC codes, and hardware regimes spanning current to projected devices. Our study reveals three asymmetric findings: The measurement duration can be significantly reduced with nearly no penalty to the logical error rate; The discriminator complexity barely affects the QEC performance, as residual errors are written into device physics rather than the model; and the impact of qubit-state readout on the logical error rate is conditional on where the hardware sits in the QEC landscape, a window that widens as devices mature.

We report a measurement of the optical frequency ratio between the $^2\mathrm{S}_{1/2}(F=0)$–${^2\mathrm{F}_{7/2}(F=3)}$ electric-octupole (E3) transition of $^{171}$Yb$^{+}$ and the $^1\mathrm{S}_0$–${^3\mathrm{P}_0}$ transition of $^{87}$Sr, $\nu_{\mathrm{Yb}^{+}}/\nu_\mathrm{Sr} = 1.495\,991\,618\,544\,900\,588\,1(65)$. Reaching a fractional uncertainty of $4.3 \times 10^{-18}$, this result improves upon the previous best by more than a factor of three and is among the few that meet the requirements for interspecies clock comparisons specified by the roadmap towards the redefinition of the SI second. The comparison is between a transportable optical lattice clock and a stationary single-ion clock. It spans a period of nearly two years, during which the transportable clock was intermittently operated off-campus. The ratio was reproducibly measured during four separate campaigns, which are consistent within their statistical uncertainties. The results demonstrate reproducible $10^{-18}$ level operation of the transportable clock and thus validate its application for chronometric geodesy and as a transfer standard for inter-institute clock comparisons, e.g., in the absence of optical fiber links.

We prove that the entanglement of formation of every two-mode Gaussian state coincides with its Gaussian restriction, solving a longstanding open problem in continuous variable quantum information theory. The key result is a sharp affine relation between entanglement and a generalized Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen observable, valid for arbitrary pure two-mode states, including non-Gaussian ones. We further prove that the entanglement of formation is additive on arbitrary tensor products of two-mode Gaussian states, and hence coincides with the entanglement cost, settling the latter for all two-mode Gaussian states. As a consequence, we obtain in closed form the entanglement cost of thermal-loss, thermal-amplifier and additive-noise bosonic channels. Our results, which also extend to bisymmetric multimode states, establish that no two-mode state is less entangled than the Gaussian state with the same covariance matrix, yielding measurable lower bounds on both the entanglement of formation and the entanglement cost of arbitrary non-Gaussian states.

We introduce Pangaea, a fault-tolerant quantum architecture that uses a quantum bus to mediate logical operations between remote patches of two-dimensional topological codes. The bus is an auxiliary gauge-code strip whose measurements reconstruct joint logical operators while preserving nearest-neighbor physical connectivity. Enabling native heterogeneous topological codes and multi-qubit Pauli operations, the quantum bus can be interpreted as a three-dimensional generalization of lattice surgery. We require only $O(dN_L)$ physical qubits to implement multi-qubit interactions for $N_L$ distance-$d$ logical qubits, compared to $O(d^2N_L)$ of traditional two-dimensional architectures. At the 50-logical-qubit scale, Pangaea uses up to $10\times$ fewer physical qubits than planar surface-code architectures at matched logical error rates. We verify fault-tolerance of long-range measurement-based CNOT primitives for both surface–surface and surface–color joint parity measurements using pseudo-threshold simulations. We use this protocol to construct a native heterogeneous 15-to-1 magic-state distillation module using the quantum bus. These results establish Pangaea as a scalable architecture for three-dimensional fault-tolerant quantum computing that resolves the routing bottleneck of planar lattice surgery.

We present a reinforcement learning-optimized Rydberg electrometer based on the asymmetric blockade effect and achieve high-sensitivity electric field sensing in Rydberg arrays. Microwave dressing induces asymmetric blockade to suppress interactions between target atoms, while keeping the coupling between the central control atom and target atoms field-tunable near Förster resonance. The field-regulated blockade radius affects the detectable atomic population signals, thereby enabling electric field sensing via state-selective readout. In planar atomic arrays, classical Fisher information exhibits near-quadratic scaling with atom number and approaches the Heisenberg limit. Reinforcement learning-designed composite pulses greatly enhance quantum Fisher information by up to one order of magnitude compared with single $\pi$ pulses. We further establish a compact six-atom spherical configuration for vector electrometry, in which field orientation is extracted from calibrated axial populations, and weak bias fields eliminate dipole-dipole-induced sign and magic-angle ambiguities. Numerical tests against Rabi frequency deviation, positional error, residual inter-target coupling and projection noise demonstrate the reliability of this scheme. This work provides an experimentally viable approach to realize high-precision three-dimensional Rydberg electric field sensing.

Achieving joint quantum-enhanced precision in multiparameter sensing requires both high sensitivity and measurement compatibility. These two aspects are characterized by the quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM) and the Uhlmann curvature matrix (UCM), respectively, with weak compatibility corresponding to the vanishing of the relevant UCM elements. Here, we develop a symmetry-projection framework that classifies phase generators into subspace-preserving and subspace-changing sectors. For probe states confined to a symmetry subspace, symmetry projection imposes a common block-diagonal structure on the QFIM and UCM, rendering cross-sector parameters simultaneously free from information cross-talk and measurement incompatibility. When the subspace-changing generators act as scalars within the occupied subspace, the corresponding QFIM block reduces to four times the symmetrized covariance matrix, even for mixed probe states. For parity-protected collective $\mathrm{SU}(2)$ systems, this structure singles out the transverse anti-squeezed quadrature and the longitudinal mean-spin direction as natural optimal sensing axes. Applied to a dissipative one-axis twisting model, the dynamically generated probe state exhibits identically vanishing UCM elements for transverse–longitudinal parameter pairs, while maintaining nearly balanced, Heisenberg-scaled QFIM components over a broad transient window. Our work opens a route to symmetry-protected, weakly compatible multiparameter sensing in interacting quantum many-body systems.

We introduce a validation process that harnesses engineered many-body relaxation to control and calibrate quantum hardware. On two independently developed neutral-atom processors, we realize the many-body quantum Mpemba effect in an open system for the first time. Initial-state engineering creates fast and slow relaxation pathways: the fast pathway opens access to unreachable mixed-state physics before hardware noise obscures the target dynamics, whereas the slow pathway amplifies hidden imperfections in preparation and control. Computational-basis measurements directly and independently benchmark dynamical reliability, revealing each processor's actual operating window as a many-body simulator. The processors are thus judged by the very dynamics they are built to reproduce. Complementary responses disentangle control errors and drive an adaptive, time-resolved scheme that supplies hardware developers directly actionable corrections, enhancing faithful reproduction of the target dynamics. These results establish many-body relaxation as a transferable validation and calibration tool for programmable quantum processors.

We study the number of copies needed to estimate the root Uhlmann fidelity between an unknown quantum state and a classically known reference, under collective measurements. If the unknown state has rank at most $s$, we give an estimator using $O(s^2/\varepsilon^2)$ copies, uniformly in the ambient dimension and reference rank. The estimator applies a random-purification channel and a covariant pure-state measurement, then rescales the observed amplitude before evaluating a weighted nuclear norm. Combined with the lower bound established independently in our first version and in concurrent work of Wang, this determines the worst-case complexity under rank bounds $r,s$ as $\min\{r,s\}^2/\varepsilon^2$ up to logarithmic factors in the smaller rank. The same estimator gives the upper bound $O(r(\operatorname{tr}\sqrt{\sigma})^2/\varepsilon^2)$ for a rank-$r$ reference $\sigma$. We combine spectral truncation with lower bounds obtained by embedding hard instances for the maximally mixed reference into spectral subspaces. For spectra $\lambda_i\propto i^{-\alpha}$ with fixed $1<\alpha\le2$, as $\varepsilon\downarrow0$ with $r\ge C_\alpha\varepsilon^{-2/(\alpha-1)}$, the bounds determine the complexity as $\widetilde\Theta_\alpha(\varepsilon^{-4/(\alpha-1)})$. In particular, inverse-square spectra have accuracy exponent four. The lower-bound construction uses exact moment matching and an explicitly computable Schur measure.

Based on the Generator Coordinate Method (GCM), we use a Quantum GCM (QuGCM) within a hybrid quantum-classical framework to simulate low-lying eigenstates of nuclear systems on quantum devices. The generator basis states are constructed from Hartree-Fock (HF) reference states, excited via symmetry-adapted unitary coupled-cluster (UCC) operators. These states are prepared as non-orthogonal quantum circuits and measured pairwise to compute the required overlap and Hamiltonian kernels. The resulting data is processed using a classical generalized-eigenvalue solver, following the GCM formalism, to extract the system's energy spectrum. To enhance efficiency and reduce circuit depth, we apply the Adaptive Generator Coordinate Inspired method (ADAPT-GCIM), which iteratively selects generator excitations based on energy gradients, thereby avoiding the need to explore the full Hilbert space. Our implementation is applied to nuclear systems, specifically the deuteron with the Reid68 potential and shell-model Hamiltonians of $^6$Li and $^{38}$Ar. For each system, both the QuGCM and ADAPT-GCIM methods produce energy spectra in agreement with classical diagonalization results, demonstrating robustness even under noise and limited-depth constraints. Additionally, we compare fermionic encoding strategies, specifically Jordan-Wigner (JW) transformations of one-hot (OH) encoding and Gray code (GC) mappings, and show that GC encoding reduces circuit complexity and improves fidelity during multi-reference state preparation. Our findings indicate that QuGCM and ADAPT-GCIM provide a practical and scalable path toward simulating correlated quantum systems, with lesser vulnerability to noise and better compatibility with the limitations of current quantum hardware.

We theoretically predict and experimentally demonstrate that a reduced spatial-mode demultiplexing (SPADE) measurement using only the two lowest-order Hermite-Gaussian modes exhibits remarkable robustness against background noise in discriminating between a single source and two incoherent point sources. We establish a theoretical framework incorporating uniform background noise and derive an analytical Chernoff exponent expression, showing that SPADE consistently outperforms direct imaging (DI) across all source separations. Experimental results confirm that SPADE-based hypothesis testing approaches the quantum limit even when the background-to-signal photon ratio per pixel is 0.11. This advantage stems from SPADE's ability to concentrate source information into minimal detection modes, reducing the cumulative background noise impact. Our findings provide a practical detection scheme for applications where background noise is inevitable, such as astronomical observations and quantum sensing.

Magnonic systems are a promising resource for quantum technologies because of their ability to couple significantly disparate quantum platforms and the generation of nonclassical magnon states through magnon blockade has attracted growing attention. In practice, however magnon blockade relies on a destructive interference that is easily spoiled by fabrication-induced coupling asymmetries. Here we show that the relative phase between two magnon drives acts as an active compensation knob that restores this interference even when the couplings are mismatched. We study two Kittel magnon modes in a hybrid system in which a superconducting qubit coupled to a common cavity mode mediates the inter-mode interaction and we find that tuning the drive phase produces both magnon blockade and a strong violation of the classical Cauchy–Schwarz inequality. We derive the analytic condition for the phase that compensates a given coupling asymmetry and confirm it against exact numerical simulations. The drive phase thereby serves as a control knob that switches the system between classical and quantum regimes. Our results enable phase-controlled magnonic quantum information processing.

We show that the quantum entanglement between the conformal field theories (CFTs) living on the future and past boundaries in the de Sitter/conformal field theory (dS/CFT) correspondence can be described by Wick rotating to a geometry with two timelike directions. We propose a new realization of the dS/CFT correspondence in which quantum gravity on this two-time geometry is holographically dual to a CFT defined on a Lorentzian torus. We show that this duality reproduces key features of dS holography, including the dS entropy, correlation functions, and pseudoentropy. Finally, by extending the framework of path-integral optimization, we explain how dS spacetime emerges from the CFT on the Lorentzian torus.

This paper proposes a multi ring M-APSK constellation optimization method for discrete-modulated continuous variable quantum key distribution. Unlike conventional APSK structures with fixed ring spacing and predefined ring probabilities, the proposed method optimizes the ring radius ratio and ring probability to improve the finite-size secret key rate. A method based on the Gram matrix is used to calculate the nonzero spectrum of the average state $\tau$, and fidelity is used to compare the optimized discrete average state with the Gaussian average state. The results show that the proposed structure extends the maximum transmission distance of 16-APSK by approximately 15% compared with the conventional binomial APSK structure. The optimization gain is larger for small size APSK constellations, where the average state has a larger structural gap from Gaussian modulation.

One-dimensional (1D) superlattices provide one simplified platform for exploring moiré physics from a low-dimensional perspective, with the ratio of lattice constants playing a role analogous to the twist angle in two-dimensional bilayers. Here, we propose a 1D $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric bichromatic optical lattice for a weakly repulsive Bose-Einstein condensate and investigate how the interplay of dissipation and interaction impacts the lowest moiré flat band. Without interaction, we find that the lowest-band flatness induced by commensurate ratios exhibits a parity-dependent response to the $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric imaginary potential due to the distinct $\mathcal{PT}$ pairing mechanism for the energy spectrum. For ratios with even denominators (i.e., even parities), the level attraction and thus the $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetry breaking occur within the lowest two bands, leading to a monotonic broadening of the lowest flat band, whereas odd denominators (i.e., odd parities) yield a nonmonotonic response due to the $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetry breaking within the second and the third lowest bands instead while the lowest band remains purely real. This parity-dependent phenomenon can be understood by the perturbation theory. Furthermore, by solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, we also find that although the weak repulsive interaction can broaden the moiré bands alone, the combined effects of interaction and imaginary potential also lead to parity-dependent behaviors. For even parities, band flattening is consistently diminished, whereas for odd parities, the imaginary potential can either enhance or reduce the degree of flattening. These results pave the way for experimental studies of dissipation and interaction effects on band flatness in moiré systems.

Quantum metrology, which addresses parameter estimation in quantum systems, has broad applications across science and technology. Conventional metrology protocols for multi-qubit states in the multi-parameter regime typically require highly complex quantum measurements, leading to substantial quantum-resource costs. In this work, we introduce a family of metrology protocols that use only few-qubit measurements, thereby significantly reducing the required resources. For arbitrary pure states, one of our protocols approaches the quantum Cramér-Rao bound up to an overhead in sample complexity that scales linearly with the number of qubits, irrespective of the number of parameters to be estimated. For typical Haar-random states, this overhead can be reduced to a constant. Our results build on recent advances in quantum state certification protocols with few-qubit measurements: we establish a universal connection between certification and metrology in which the precision of the certification protocol determines the metrological overhead. We also illustrate our approach through an example of Hamiltonian estimation from ground states.

High-quality entangled states of photons underlie quantum information science (QIS) applications across communication, sensing, and computing. In many discrete-variable photonic QIS architectures, large application-ready states (e.g., cluster states, repeater graph states) are constructed via fusion measurements on small entangled seed states, of which Bell states are the fundamental example. The quality of seed-state generation therefore sets a baseline for application performance, making it crucial to understand this process under realistic error mechanisms, particularly in integrated photonics experiments. In this work, we analyze five heralded schemes for generating event-ready photonic Bell states, contrasting their heralding probabilities, fidelities, and error robustness. We develop a hierarchy of error models, progressing from an analytically tractable lumped-loss model to realistic heralded single-photon sources with multiphoton emission errors and finally to integrated frequency-bin implementations with architecture-dependent loss. Across these models, we find that schemes based on higher-order multiphoton interference provide superior fidelity robustness in low-loss implementations, while lower-photon-number schemes can be preferable when probabilistic sources or lossy beamsplitters dominate the resource cost. Our results provide design guidance for integrated discrete-variable quantum photonics, with particular relevance for frequency-bin architectures where active beamsplitter loss can determine the optimal resource-state-generation strategy.

We explore Bloch oscillations of $N=1$ and $N=2$ photonic N00N states, using an array of linearly growing effective index waveguides with a simulated asymmetric loss profile. Starting with equal probability input $N=1$ and $N=2$ N00N states, and siphoning off a portion of the waveguides near the half Bloch period, we selectively output specific photon number states. Tuning the input phase, we achieve dynamic switching between 2-photon dominated (80% of the output) and 1-photon dominated (90% of the output) cases. This offers a path to improved state preparation in photonic circuits used in computing and networking.

Exact time-dependent density-functional theory (DFT) separates the exchange-correlation potential into interaction and kinetic-correlation components, but the structural relation between them remains unclear. We establish a representability constraint based on the off-diagonal expansion of the one-electron reduced density matrix (1RDM) relative to a chosen reference dynamics. A non-zero linear off-diagonal term of the 1RDM generates a current density beyond the representable space of the reference, while a nontrivial quadratic off-diagonal structure activates the kinetic-correlation component. The resulting hierarchy provides a criterion for assessing, from the spatial locality of electronic correlation, whether a given exchange-correlation functional or a more general electron-correlation approximation remains adequate. In a one-dimensional two-electron correlation quench, retaining the exact interaction component while setting the kinetic component to zero suppresses the density broadening of the exact evolution. These results establish a spatial-order hierarchy among the force components governing the density dynamics and provide an exact constraint for the construction and assessment of nonadiabatic approximations.

Shallow nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond are promising nanoscale quantum sensors, yet their coherence is strongly limited by surface-induced noise. Surface adsorbates are widely believed to be a major source of decoherence. Here, we test this assumption by characterizing shallow single NV centers under ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) conditions, where the diamond surface is kept free of adsorbates, and comparing their behavior to ambient conditions. Surprisingly, we observe a ~4x reduction in the Hahn echo coherence time T2 in UHV. By combining Hahn echo measurements in the single-quantum (SQ) and double-quantum (DQ) bases, we separate contributions from different noise sources and find that both electric and magnetic noise are enhanced in UHV. In contrast, T1 measurements reveal an increased DQ T1 in UHV, indicating suppressed electric field noise in the ~100 MHz frequency regime. These results point to a modification of the surface noise spectrum upon adsorbate removal, with different frequency regimes arising from distinct microscopic mechanisms. Specifically, we find that the low frequency noise is consistent with increased surface charge in UHV that can be compensated by surface adsorbates in ambient conditions. Our findings highlight a complex and previously underappreciated role of surface adsorbates in shaping the noise environment of shallow NV centers, with important implications for nanoscale quantum sensing.

Unextendible product bases (UPBs) are important structures in quantum information theory, with applications to completely entangled subspaces, bound entanglement, and local indistinguishability. Since many properties and applications of UPBs are closely related to their cardinalities, one of the central problems in the study of UPBs is to determine whether UPBs of prescribed sizes exist in a given multipartite system. In this paper, we introduce a SAT-assisted framework based on decompositions of the \(N\)-dimensional hypercube. We define \(O_N\)-tile decompositions and prove a tile-to-UPB theorem: every \(O_N\)-tile decomposition induces a UPB through a construction based on tile-wise Fourier product bases and a global stopper state. We then encode the search for such decompositions as a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem and use SAT solvers to generate explicit instances. In terms of verification, we also implement a UPB verification algorithm based on local orthogonality graphs and unsaturated subspaces. The algorithm can be used to determine whether an arbitrary finite set of product states forms a UPB. Using this framework, we obtain UPBs of several sizes in some tripartite and quadripartite systems, including sizes \(13,14,\ldots,23\) in \(\mathbb C^3\otimes\mathbb C^3\otimes\mathbb C^3\). Moreover, the small-dimensional instances obtained here can serve as seed UPBs for recursive constructions, leading to further examples in larger multipartite systems.

For each $d\geq 1$ we construct a norm-1 Hermitian operator whose Pauli expansion contains $N(d)=\exp(\Omega(d^2))$ terms, each of degree $d$ and magnitude $1/\sqrt{N(d)}$ - the largest magnitude permitted by Parseval's identity. For comparison, if a bounded diagonal operator (or equivalently, a bounded degree-$d$ function on the Boolean cube) has $N(d)$ Pauli coefficients, all of magnitude $\Omega(1/\sqrt{N(d)})$, then $N(d)\leq \exp(\widetilde{O}(d^{1.5}))$. This construction implies the noncommutative Bohnenblust–Hille (BH) constant satisfies $\mathrm{BH}_{M_2}(d)\geq\exp(\Omega(d))$. Together with the upper bounds proved in prior work, this settles the asymptotic growth of $\mathrm{BH}_{M_2}(d)$ as exponential. Our lower bound also asymptotically separates $\mathrm{BH}_{M_2}(d)$ from the (classical) hypercube BH constant $\mathrm{BH}_{\{\pm 1\}}(d)$, which in turn is known to be subexponential: $\mathrm{BH}_{\{\pm 1\}}(d)\leq C^{\sqrt{d \log d}}$. Our Hamiltonians are also unitary and thus quantum Boolean functions in the sense of Montanaro and Osborne (2010). As such they refute the quantum Fourier Entropy-Influence conjecture of Bu et al. (2024), a natural generalization of the classical Fourier Entropy-Influence conjecture due to Friedgut and Kalai (1996).