Papers

The observable of the Talbot effect is the intensity behind the grating: the density of the evolving field, not the field itself. Its fractality was previously known only for step data with rational jumps. We prove the general case. For arbitrary real data of bounded variation with at least one jump, the density of the free Schrödinger evolution on the torus is fractal at almost every time, with graph of upper box dimension exactly three halves. Its critical Sobolev mass diverges logarithmically, at a rate given in closed form by Wiener's jump statistic of the datum and independent of the positions and phases of the jumps. The same rate is halved along time traces and doubled for the Airy flow, so the critical mass probes the dispersion relation. Transported by the rank calculus of derangetropy operators, the theory equips every probability law with a quantum carpet: Gauss-sum revivals on quantile cells at rational times, a universal fractal at almost every other. The spectral growth rate of a single measured intensity profile returns the jump content of the grating, a prediction open to test in optical and matter-wave interferometry.

The hydrogen molecular ion and the hydrogen molecule are treated in an approximate calculation based on classical electrodynamics which includes classical zero-point radiation. It is found within the classical theory that a molecular ion is less-well bound than a hydrogen atom plus a distant proton. The smaller binding energy is explained due to the repulsive nature of the force between the proton and the atom when considering the most natural resonant orbit of the electron. The approximate classical electromagnetic calculation gives a binding energy of $2.1eV$ and a proton separation of $0.916A^{o}$ for the hydrogen molecular ion. The hydrogen molecule is formed by adding a single additional electron to the ion. The electrostatic attraction of the electron to the ion gives a binding energy of $4.6eV$ and a inter-proton separation of $0.6A^{o}$ for the hydrogen molecule in this classical electromagnetic approximation.

The Quantum Fisher information is frequently studied in the fields of quantum sensing and quantum metrology, as it specifies the sensitivity of a sensor through the Crámer-Rao bound, and in condensed matter physics where it relates to the quantum metric. Measuring the quantum Fisher information is therefore of significant current interest. In this work, we propose a scheme for measuring the quantum Fisher information with respect to any parameter in a general two-band solid state system using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy with carefully tuned incidence angles and light polarization. We investigate conditions under which this can be related back to information about the ground state of the material itself changing with system parameters.

The Boltzmann-Loschmidt dispute in 1876-1877 discussed the problem of time reversal of ther- malization from time reversible classical equations of motion. Here, 150 years later, we highlight this problem in the frame of quantum computing. A quantum protocol is proposed that allows to perform a time reversal of complex evolution in the regime of many-body quantum chaos with many qubits. The system represents an evolution of qubits on a square lattice with inter-qubit next-nearest static couplings with a driven pulsed magnetic field. The system entropy grows rapidly to maximal values but returns to initial small values after time reversal. This time reversal is shown to be stable with respect to quantum gate imperfections. However, similar to the Lorenz butterfly effect, there is the butterfly effect of qubit when inversion of only one qubit breaks time reversibility of the whole system. It is argued that this protocol is accessible to nowadays quantum computers and annealers with hundreds of qubits.

We study parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) integrated as residual sidecar modules within a ResNet-50 backbone for 31-class neural population decoding—imagined handwriting classification from multi-neuron spike rasters. Under strictly controlled conditions (fixed data splits, seeds, and optimizer), we compare four model variants: baseline, quantum sidecar with frozen input projection, quantum sidecar with backbone-gradient-trained projection, and a measurement-guided variant that aligns angle encodings with circuit measurement outcomes. The backbone-gradient variant improves accuracy in 3/4 seeds (+0.19% mean, 95% CI [-1.10%, +1.48%]) and consistently reduces Linear CKA similarity to baseline features ($\Delta=-0.025$, 4/4 seeds), indicating genuine structural reorganization of representations. A nine-variant ablation identifies simple shallow architectures as the most effective and reproducible configuration. Measurement-guided training consistently improves representation geometry without reducing accuracy. All results use noiseless statevector simulation on 4 qubits, a regime chosen to reflect the practical constraints of current near-term superconducting hardware; no quantum computational advantage over classical methods is claimed.

Block encoding embeds a matrix as a sub-block of a unitary matrix and serves as a fundamental input model for quantum algorithms based on quantum singular value transformation, enabling polynomial transformations of matrices encoded in unitary operators. Block encoding of unknown quantum states can be useful for quantum learning; however, the fundamental limits on converting between unknown quantum states and their block-encoding unitary channels remain poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate this convertibility in both directions. First, we prove that implementing an $\varepsilon$-approximate block-encoding unitary channel of an unknown quantum state requires $\Omega(1/\varepsilon)$ copies of the state, matching known upper bounds up to logarithmic factors. Second, we show that recovering a rank-$r$, $d$-dimensional quantum state $\rho$ given query access to its block-encoding unitary channel generally requires $\Omega((1/\lambda_{\max}(\rho))\sqrt{d/r})$ queries, where $\lambda_{\max}(\rho)$ is the maximum eigenvalue of $\rho$, revealing an unavoidable dependence on the dimension of the state. Our results identify inherent limitations of block encoding as a representation of unknown quantum states and reveal a separation between learning properties of a quantum state and generating the state itself. Using our techniques, we further establish lower bounds for specific state-generation tasks, including ground-state preparation and Gibbs-state preparation.

Variational approaches based on neural quantum states and physics-informed neural networks provide powerful paradigms for simulating non-Markovian open quantum dynamics. However, extending these methods into the strongly non-Markovian regime reveals a critical bottleneck: even minute errors in the time evolution can translate into substantial deviations in physical observables. The fundamental origin of this stringent precision requirement, as well as how non-Markovianity governs it, remains an open question. Here, we develop a theoretical framework that systematically characterizes error propagation in variational non-Markovian dynamics. By combining analytical derivations with numerical verification, we present the first quantitative description of variational error evolution over time. Our analysis uncovers an intrinsic error-backflow mechanism driven by long-lived environmental memory. This mechanism establishes a fundamental precision barrier and provides concrete guidance for designing robust variational algorithms for strongly non-Markovian quantum systems.

Local discrimination of quantum states is a fundamental task in distributed quantum information processing and underlies applications such as quantum communication, data hiding, and secret sharing. Here we investigate a weak form of local indistinguishability by asking how easily it can disappear when the candidate set is reduced or an additional copy of the unknown state is supplied. We introduce inclusion-minimal locally indistinguishable sets, namely, locally indistinguishable sets for which every proper subset is perfectly distinguishable by local operations and classical communication (LOCC), and show that every finite locally indistinguishable set contains such a subset. We further find that any inclusion-minimal locally indistinguishable sets becomes perfectly distinguishable by LOCC when two identical copies are available, although a single copy is insufficient. Fininally, We construct explicit inclusion-minimal locally indistinguishable product-state sets in $(\mathbb C^d)^{\otimes n}$ for every odd $d=2k+1$ and $n\ge2$. These results show that local indistinguishability can be nontrivial at the single-copy level yet fragile under either the removal of candidate states or a modest increase in copy resources, providing a complementary perspective on the structure of quantum nonlocality.

Can a probability distribution measured in one basis determine complex quantum geometry? The answer is affirmative for a lattice Laughlin quasihole. The exact occupation law at one generic reference position, together with the known analytic quasihole factor, fixes the complete complex Gram kernel. A finite snapshot ensemble estimates this kernel without preparing another member of the family, and thereby determines finite-distance overlaps, Bargmann phases, the quantum metric, and the Berry curvature. The same analytic structure confines the family to an exact projective subspace whose dimension grows at most linearly with particle number. Exact enumeration of a Nielsen-Cirac-Sierra state demonstrates finite-shot reconstruction of both the metric and a geometric phase. Moreover, a Rényi-2 divergence sets the statistical range of the reconstruction while, at nondegenerate points, occupation readout also attains the local single-copy multiparameter information bound.

We further develop Kernel Quantum State Estimation (KQSE), a fully data-driven nonparametric method for continuous variable quantum state reconstruction and characterization, introduced in our recent work and rooted in nonparametric kernel density estimation (KDE). Unlike approaches relying on finite-dimensional basis truncations, parametric ansätze, or prior models, KQSE combines a new kernel estimator of the characteristic function of the tomographic quadrature distribution with suitable kernel integral transformations. The characteristic function is estimated directly from experimental homodyne or heterodyne data and subsequently transformed to estimate quantum state representations and characteristics, including the Wigner function and the density matrix kernel. Observing that several other physically relevant representations and characteristics admit transformations of a closely related form, we derive convergence rates for the corresponding broad class of KQSE-based estimators. The resulting framework covers all phase-space representations, the photon-number tomogram, trace products of quantum states, and purity. We derive mean squared error convergence rates for these kernel transformed estimators and show that the corresponding KQSE applications inherit the near optimal rate O(T^{-1}), where $T$ is the total number of measurements. The proposed theory applies equally to Gaussian and non-Gaussian continuous variable quantum states without imposing a Fock space cutoff. Numerical experiments on simulated Gaussian and non-Gaussian states and real homodyne data demonstrate the advantages of KQSE over state-of-the-art methods, establishing it as a statistically consistent and computationally modest framework for continuous variable quantum state estimation and characterization, particularly in the non-Gaussian regime.

We study a spinning optomechanical cavity that is coupled to a meandering waveguide at multiple spatially separated points, forming a giant-cavity configuration. The resulting self-interference makes the effective optical driving, linewidth, and frequency shift strongly dependent on the propagation phase in the waveguide, while the rotation-induced Sagnac-Fizeau shift causes the clockwise (CW) and counterclockwise (CCW) cavity modes to experience distinct interference phases. Under single-tone driving, this mechanism enables phase-controlled phonon cooling and, in the presence of cavity rotation, nonreciprocal cooling, with one propagation direction approaching the mechanical ground-state regime while the opposite direction remains less efficiently cooled. Under two-tone driving, the same interference mechanism engineers a squeezed reservoir for the mechanical mode, producing steady-state squeezing that likewise becomes nonreciprocal under cavity rotation. These results establish multi-point self-interference as a versatile mechanism for phase-controlled optomechanical reservoir engineering and show that, when combined with cavity rotation, it provides a route to nonreciprocal quantum effects.

We propose an autonomous scheme for stabilizing prescribed Fock states in a Kerr cavity by rectifying anti-Jaynes–Cummings interactions with auxiliary-qubit relaxation. Full Lindblad simulations demonstrate steady states dominated by the Fock states $|1\rangle$ through $|4\rangle$, accompanied by pronounced Wigner negativity. An analytical birth–death model captures the steady-state populations and identifies the operating regime for stabilization. These results establish auxiliary-qubit relaxation as a resource for autonomous reservoir engineering and provide a route to nonclassical bosonic-state preparation in a single Kerr cavity and, through a boundary reservoir, in a Kerr-cavity chain.

We investigate localization phenomena and exact mobility edges in a quasiperiodic Aharonov-Bohm chain, where the 1D canonical diagonal and off-diagonal Aubry-André-Harper models are laterally coupled to an auxiliary sublattice threaded by a synthetic magnetic flux. By analytically computing the Lyapunov exponent via Avila's global theory of one-frequency Schrödinger operators, we derive exact expressions for mobility edges. In the diagonal limit, the coupling to the auxiliary sublattice generates hyperbolic mobility edges that exhibit a sign-changing divergence and can be continuously tuned by the magnetic flux. In the off-diagonal regime, the interference between quasiperiodic hopping and indirect tunneling through the auxiliary sublattice gives rise to exact anomalous mobility edges that separate critical and extended states. Critical states and anomalous mobility edges emerge even in the absence of incommensurately distributed zeros in the hopping modulation, a behavior distinct from that of conventional off-diagonal models. Our results establish a rigorous theoretical framework for engineering controllable mobility edges, with the synthetic flux providing a tunable experimental knob that paves the way for realizations in platforms such as superconducting quantum circuits and photonic waveguides.

We consider an infinite one dimensional array of alternating charges embedded in a two-dimensional configuration space and subjected to a weak static electric field transverse to the lattice axis. Expansion of the Coulomb interaction about a lattice site gives a transverse restoring stiffness $\kappa \propto \zeta(3)/L^3$, defining the oscillator length $a_y$, while Bloch periodicity is retained along the lattice direction and the transverse motion is represented in a harmonic basis. The Coulomb matrix elements are governed by the dimensionless scale $\eta_{r-s}$, which couples the reciprocal-lattice transfer to the transverse oscillator length. A regularized one dimensional extension is also introduced through Coulomb regularization, yielding a finite diagonal offset and an exponentially decaying even-transfer coupling in reciprocal space. Small $\eta_{r-s}$ yields logarithmic, parity-dependent transverse-state coupling, while large $\eta_{r-s}$ approaches the one-dimensional Coulomb limit. In the finite-order spectrum, the latter approaches the Kronig Penney reference toward the band edge while retaining distinct Brillouin zone curvature. The formulation therefore identifies two characteristic quantities of the alternating lattice: the transverse restoring stiffness and the one-dimensional Madelung form, while retaining the two dimensional structure required to describe the response to a transverse electric field. Keywords: alternating charge lattice; Bloch states; Coulomb interaction; transverse electric field; regularization; reciprocal space coupling; Brillouin zone spectrum.

Dicke states $|J=N/2,m\rangle$ of a collection of $N$ atoms were central to Dicke's theory of superradiance. Except for the fully polarized end states, they are entangled many-body states; in particular, the single-excitation Dicke state is the W state well known in quantum information science. However, deterministic preparation of Dicke states with a prescribed spin projection remains challenging, especially without relying on postselection or heralding. Here we present a detuning-programmed Hamiltonian protocol using atoms or qubits in a dispersive cavity subject to a coherent transverse drive. In the absence of the drive, the off-resonant cavity produces an effective collective-spin interaction. By combining this cavity-mediated interaction with the coherent drive, tuning the atom–drive detuning enables the protocol, in principle, to target any allowed Dicke state along the symmetric Dicke ladder. Starting from the transverse-drive ground state, adiabatic ground-state interpolation prepares the selected Dicke state by ramping down the drive strength while ramping up the cavity-mediated interaction. After preparation, tuning the cavity into resonance with the atoms or qubits provides a direct way to probe the collective-emission response of the prepared Dicke state. We discuss implementation with superconducting circuit QED and show that the prepared states, especially the central Dicke state with $m=0$, provide resources for quantum sensing with Heisenberg-limited scaling.

Deep thermalization concerns the emergence of universal pure-state statistics in projected ensembles at late times, yet the mechanism governing the initial growth of randomness remains unclear. Here, we study the short-time dynamics of projected ensembles generated from initially unentangled states, quantifying their randomness using frame potentials. For arbitrary Hamiltonians, provided the initial bath state has full support in the measurement basis, we show that the frame potentials to cubic order in time are determined entirely by the subsystem purity, and hence by the bipartite entanglement generated between the unmeasured subsystem and its complement. The entanglement timescale therefore sets the initial timescale for the growth of local randomness, independently of the bath measurement basis. For unitarily invariant Hamiltonian ensembles, we further relate the projected-ensemble frame potential at order $k$ to the $4k$-point spectral form factor, or equivalently to the $2k$th frame potential of the global unitary dynamics, establishing a direct connection between local and global randomness. Our results identify entanglement as the mechanism governing the onset of randomness in projected ensembles and clarify how local randomness emerges from global quantum dynamics.

In a complete quantum theory, one would construct it based on what we can observe in a system and operationally define in our universe. This philosophy goes back to some of the original ideals of quantum theory defined by W. Heisenberg, N. Bohr, and others as part of the Copenhagen school of thought. We argue in this letter that that if one wishes to construct a complete quantum field theory, that it is most natural to construct it based on a nonlocal theory of observable principles. If this interpretation is valid, then the one-particle nonrelativistic limit that recovers quantum mechanics would as well be dynamically nonlocal. In this interpretation we derive the nonlocal Schrödinger equation. We will as well demonstrate that the canonical position–momentum commutator and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle emerge from translation covariance.

This work aims at bringing the microphysics model of quantum optomechanics (QOM) proposed in [1] and developed in [2, 3] one step closer to be applicable to realistic experimental conditions, specifically, for imperfect mirrors, and for real materials. The atom/mirror-oscillator-field (AMOF) model features an internal degree of freedom for a mirror or an atom whose interaction with a quantum field determines the transmission functions of a mirror or the dynamic polarizability of an atom. We study three problems with this model: 1) An imperfect mirror moving in a cavity field, comparing results from the AMOF model with the boundary condition methods; 2) We analyze how well the dynamic polarizability derived from the AMOF model fits the tabulated data at different frequencies. 3) Combining these two parts we analyze the quantum fluctuations induced Casimir-Polder energy between a dilute atom space and a wall. We examine how well we can use the three constituent parameters of the idf oscillator in the AMOF model to match with published results on a meta-stable He* atom near a Au plate and found excellent agreements. These examples show that the AMOF model not only has a sound theoretical structure, because it is based on the microphysics dynamics of the basic constituents, it also has good practical values because it can produce accurate results for certain real materials.

Measurement readout programs the Gaussian operation implemented by a continuous-variable cluster wire. For the standard three-node wire, momentum homodyne readout gives an additive parity channel with finite-squeezing noise. We classify the pattern-resolved input–output covariance transformations generated by calibrated uncorrelated Arthurs–Kelly readout on one or both consumed nodes. Any finite Arthurs–Kelly position record produces a conditional Gaussian filter whose gain and residual covariance depend on the input covariance entries, rather than an input-independent additive Gaussian channel. Writing $\mathrm{A}$ for Arthurs–Kelly readout and $\mathrm{H}$ for homodyne readout, the readout pattern selects the filtered sector, with $\mathrm{AH}$ selecting position, $\mathrm{HA}$ selecting momentum, and $\mathrm{AA}$ retaining both. The hierarchy $0 < \tau_{\mathrm{AA}} < \min \left\{ \tau_{\mathrm{AH}}, \tau_{\mathrm{HA}} \right\} < 1 = \tau_{\mathrm{HH}}$ shows that finite Arthurs–Kelly position records contract the gain-transferred covariance area. Our results identify calibrated uncorrelated Arthurs–Kelly readout as a measurement-level method for covariance-sensitive Gaussian filtering inside a fixed cluster graph.

qiskit-qudits is a Qiskit extension that simulates d-level qudits by encoding each one into m = ceil(log_2 d) qubits. Qudit gates are exposed as ordinary Qiskit Gate and ControlledGate subclasses, and operations that are not unitary gates (measurement, reset, barrier, state preparation) as dedicated Instruction subclasses dispatched through a dedicated apply() hook; every gate carries both a dense encoded unitary (via NumPy's array protocol) and a qubit-level definition. Because d need not be a power of two, the encoded Hilbert space is generally larger than the logical one; the library resolves this by the identity-padding convention, in which every gate acts as the identity on the unphysical part of the encoded space. When every operand dimension is a power of two, gates decompose into a fixed, transpiler-recognisable cascade of standard qubit gates; otherwise the library falls back to exact dense unitary synthesis, so that dimensions 2 <= d <= 16 are supported exactly, not only powers of two. This paper describes the software's circuit model, gate hierarchy, decomposition strategy, and measurement/decoding machinery, states its limitations, and verifies the implementation numerically: the qudit QFT against the discrete Fourier transform for both power-of-two and non-power-of-two d, extending the check of the underlying theory paper, which could only be run for d = 2^m, and every gate's emitted decomposition against its dense unitary across the whole gate set.

Scalable quantum networks require generating remote entanglement faster than decoherence erases it, calling for nodes that combine efficient light-matter interfaces with long coherence times. Cavity-coupled trapped ions are a promising platform for network nodes, offering high-efficiency extraction of photons. Here, we report multi-second coherence for a qubit register in a cavity-integrated ion trap. First, using dynamical decoupling on spin ground states, the coherence times of five co-trapped ion qubits are extended into the multi-second regime. Second, cavity-collected ion-photon entanglement is faithfully stored in these protected ion-memory states for multiple seconds. Third, we show that ion-memory qubits can be robust to the generation of over a thousand cavity photons by a co-trapped ion, with decoherence limited by laser crosstalk. Finally, we estimate that a modestly improved and duplicated ion-cavity system could enable the simultaneous establishment of multiple remote Bell pairs between two remote ion registers, representing a step toward networking multi-qubit prototype trapped-ion quantum processors.

Universal quantum computation requires non-Clifford gates, which stabilizer codes can provide transversally only up to a finite level of the Clifford hierarchy. Non-stabilizer codes are not subject to this bound and are the natural candidates to fill the gap. However, it is difficult to efficiently evaluate the nonstabilizerness (or magic) of non-stabilizer codes. Here, we resolve this problem for codeword-stabilized (CWS) codes by showing that the nonstabilizerness of a CWS code is determined by the difference structure of its codewords. Whenever a Sidon set of the required size exists, the most magical codes are related to the Sidon sets, whose pairwise differences are all distinct. Structural analysis demonstrates that nonstabilizerness is invariant under coset closure, giving rise to non-stabilizer codes with arbitrarily many logical qubits and constant nonstabilizerness. Nonstabilizerness of whole code families becomes exactly computable, and we obtain closed-form values for the Kerdock codes. Moreover, we reveal a tradeoff between nonstabilizerness and transversal gates. For a code with $k$ logical qubits, a diagonal transversal gate that is non-Clifford on $t$ coordinates forces the nonstabilizerness benchmark to be at most $2(k-t)$. These results reduce the search for codes with high nonstabilizerness and for transversal non-Clifford gates to classical counting problems, to which the standard tools of additive combinatorics apply.

The Stone-von Neumann theorem makes canonical quantization unique only after one imposes strong continuity of the Weyl translation groups. We show that this continuity assumption cannot be certified by any finite-resolution interrogation of the Weyl relations. A finite protocol probes only finitely many phase-space displacements and bounded expectation values, thereby determining a protocol algebra \(C_S\) generated by a finitely generated subgroup of Weyl translations, but not the regularity of an extension to the full Weyl algebra. Using the polymer representation as a canonical non-regular representation, we prove that for every regular Weyl representation, every normal state, and every finite family of bounded protocol observables, a polymer state reproduces the same expectation values to arbitrary prescribed accuracy. Thus finite agreement with Schrödinger quantum mechanics does not operationally certify the regularity hypothesis entering uniqueness. The result does not assert physical equivalence between regular and polymer quantizations, it identifies where additional input, such as Hamiltonian dynamics, energy regularity, semiclassicality, or a continuum limit, is required to distinguish or select representations. In this precise sense, non-regular polymer kinematics are not excluded by finite Weyl data alone, a point of direct relevance to quantum-gravity motivated quantizations.

Many imaging problems seek to reconstruct underlying configurations from partial observable measurements. While reconstruction algorithms operate on these measurements, the observable organization induced by the measurement process is rarely represented explicitly. We introduce TENSKEL, a combinatorial observable framework for structured measurement and reconstruction based on tensor representations defined over discrete domains. Starting from a binary latent ensemble, the framework constructs a hierarchy of tensors coupling measurement contexts to a latent Pascal organization through successive aggregation and folding operations. Each measurement context induces an observable partition of the same latent ensemble, and the resulting tensor formulation makes explicit the associated combinatorial multiplicities, shell organization, degeneracies, and induced reconstruction geometry. Rather than introducing a new reconstruction algorithm, this framework provides a mathematical representation of how latent configurations become organized under observation. The induced tensor kernel characterizes similarities between latent coordinates through their measurement-context responses, while regularized inversion provides a structured reconstruction of the latent representation from observable measurements. The binary construction further admits a natural multinomial extension to discrete simplex-supported latent representations. Connections to Pascal cellular automata and structured discrete color mappings illustrate respectively compressed and multinomial realizations of the framework. More generally, TENSKEL provides a combinatorial basis for reasoning about the organization induced by observation, with potential relevance to computational imaging, inverse problems, structured sensing, and quantum-inspired measurement formulations.

Microscopic two-level system (TLS) defects remain a primary mechanism of decoherence and operational instability in superconducting transmon qubits, necessitating scalable and automated methods for their characterization. Here, we present and benchmark two complementary analysis pipelines for extracting TLS statistics directly from time-resolved SWAP spectroscopy: one-dimensional decay-rate fitting (1D-DRF), which detects defects via localized enhancements in the qubit relaxation rate, and a deterministic, non-parametric computer-vision framework (2D-CV) that achieves two-dimensional spectral localization by exploiting the temporal persistence of coherent population suppression. We deploy both methods on SWAP spectroscopy measurements from 52 flux-tunable transmon qubits on Rigetti processors with and without moderate ($\sim 10\%$) post-fabrication frequency trimming via Alternating-Bias Assisted Annealing (ABAA). We show that both pipelines converge on a consistent global characterization of the defect landscape while exhibiting complementary sensitivity across distinct coupling regimes. Crucially, both methods independently reveal a count–loss decoupling under moderate annealing: while the total detectable TLS defect density remains statistically unchanged, the span-integrated dielectric loss is reduced by approximately a factor of two, demonstrating selective suppression of the most strongly dissipative defect channels. These results establish an automated, non-parametric analysis framework for high-throughput hardware diagnostics and provide a statistical baseline for post-fabrication defect engineering in large-scale superconducting quantum processors.

Simulations of physical systems require high-fidelity models to accurately represent reality. Simple models may be analytically tractable, but may not be sufficiently representative of reality for the given application. The cost of this simplicity is accuracy, or in the case of quantum key distribution, provable security. Sources of this accuracy gap include the difficulty of modelling physical effects which do not lend themselves well to analytical descriptions, such as afterpulsing. Here, we introduce a novel Monte Carlo based photon emission, transmission, and detection simulator, designed in the context of the Quantum Encryption and Science Satellite (QEYSSat) mission. Within this simulator, every major physical effect a photon may experience during an experiment, from emission to detection, can be accounted for in a probabilistic manner. This methodology allows for the inclusion of experimental parameters which are relevant for a satellite mission, and their impacts on secure key lengths. This simulator serves as a comprehensive baseline to predict and validate experimental data for the upcoming QEYSSat mission.

Polar molecules trapped in optical tweezer arrays offer a promising platform for quantum information processing, providing precise control and long-range interactions that enable high-fidelity gate operations. We investigate quantum error correction in this system and show the influence of underlying physical noise. A mapping is constructed from a molecular tweezer array onto a rotated surface code in which a single specification of the array, namely, which code qubits share a molecule and where those molecules are located, determines both the correlated erasure structure and the dipolar exchange graph. We compare molecular encodings with rotational qudit dimensions (D), two and four under heralded molecular loss, coherent dipolar exchange, and imperfect heralding. It is found that a D= 4 encoding with spatially dispersed pairing exhibits a finite distance crossing at approximately the same per molecule loss rate as D= 2, while using 48-49 % fewer molecules, at the cost of a 6-10 % increase in sub-threshold logical error. Fixing the encoding and varying only the spatial embedding produces substantially larger effects: pairing the two co-located qubits along a lattice direction yields a logical-sector asymmetry of approximately fifty times. Over the simulated distances (d = 5, 7, 9), the disfavoured sector shows little or no suppression of logical error with increasing code distance, whereas the favoured sector improves by a factor of 1.5-2.3. We also find that Pauli twirl of the exchange interaction overestimates the logical error rate, which we attribute to the excitation-conserving structure of the interaction. These results reveal that the spatial embedding of correlated loss units is an important design parameter for molecular architectures and that single-sector benchmarks may be insufficient when correlated loss has directional structure.

Hilbert-space ergodicity (HSE) provides a new framework for studying thermalization in driven quantum systems, complementing the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, which is restricted to static systems. This ergodicity is hierarchical: by quantifying how randomly the dynamics explores the Hilbert space, one obtains a family of levels termed $k$-HSE. While HSE has been observed at the lowest and highest levels, finite-order HSE dynamics remains largely unexplored due to the difficulty of constructing such drives. Here, we explore this intermediate regime and uncover its distinctive physics. We first propose and prove that a family of $m$-tone drives on qubits realizes $k$-HSE up to $k = 2m{-}3$, with drive parameters determined at $O(k)$ cost. Using a single nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond, we verify this design by showing that a 3-tone drive realizes 3-HSE, with fourth-order statistics depending on the initial state. Further in-depth theoretical analysis shows that this initial-state dependence is generic across drives, demonstrating the possibility of recovering the initial state from higher-order statistics even when the dynamics is ergodic. Our work broadens the study of quantum ergodicity and reveals intriguing physics within its hierarchy.

We present a route-resolved comparative assessment of Rigetti's Cepheus-1-108Q and IBM Heron-r2 processors using the established do-nothing state-transfer protocol. Rather than proposing a new protocol, we use this deterministic, low-complexity task as a high-resolution spatial probe. For each evaluated initial qubit, we report two complementary quantities: the largest tested radius within which every evaluated shortest route satisfies the operational success rule, and the longest successful route identified within the evaluated route family. To address the question "How far can you do-nothing on a quantum computer?", we prepare a quantum state, route it outward using SWAP gates, apply the inverse preparation at the destination, and route it back for measurement. We compare the measured probability of returning $0$ with the empirical cutoff $2/3$. For this circuit ordering, that comparison does not certify above-classical unknown-state transfer. While this trivial state-transfer protocol serves as the most intuitive baseline, actively preserving a quantum state across a physical lattice proves to be a non-trivial task that exposes the information to cumulative relaxation, dephasing, and environmental cross-talk. In the highlighted IBM QPU case, we identify an isotropic radius of 10 and a successful path of swap distance 27, whereas the highlighted Rigetti Cepheus case exhibits an isotropic radius of 1 but selected above-threshold routes reaching swap distance 8. These results reveal a sharp distinction between uniform spatial reliability and best-route performance. The presented quantities are empirical and conditional on the evaluated route families, finite-shot decision rule, calibration state, and execution time; they are not architecture-wide constants.

We develop a quantum circuit synthesis method for preparing a class of tensor network states. The scheme applies to states tractable with belief propagation (BP), a tensor network gauging scheme which recently allowed for classical simulations at large scales. The problem is reduced to independent, strictly local, classical variational optimizations: each nearest-neighbor two-qubit "disentangler" gate minimizes the entropy defined on an edge. Disentanglers drive the state to a product state and their Hermitian conjugate prepares the target. Each disentangling layer has depth at most $z+1$ (with $z$ the maximal number of nearest neighbors per site), the optimization has no barren plateaus, and the bond dimension stays bounded. As a demonstration, with only $3$-$5$ disentangling layers we prepare a $102$-qubit tree tensor network encoding a $17$-dimensional normal distribution and the transverse-field Ising model ground states on a $64$- to $127$-qubit heavy-hex lattice with fidelities of order $0.9-0.999$. The method opens new possibilities for quantum applications by transferring classical tensor network states onto hardware.