Entanglement is a key feature of many-body quantum systems. Measuring the entropy of different partitions of a quantum system provides a way to probe its entanglement structure. Here, we present and ...experimentally demonstrate a protocol for measuring the second-order Rényi entropy based on statistical correlations between randomized measurements. Our experiments, carried out with a trapped-ion quantum simulator with partition sizes of up to 10 qubits, prove the overall coherent character of the system dynamics and reveal the growth of entanglement between its parts, in both the absence and presence of disorder. Our protocol represents a universal tool for probing and characterizing engineered quantum systems in the laboratory, which is applicable to arbitrary quantum states of up to several tens of qubits.
The spectral form factor (SFF), characterizing statistics of energy eigenvalues, is a key diagnostic of many-body quantum chaos. In addition, partial spectral form factors (PSFFs) can be defined ...which refer to subsystems of the many-body system. They provide unique insights into energy eigenstate statistics of many-body systems, as we show in an analysis on the basis of random matrix theory and of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. We propose a protocol that allows the measurement of the SFF and PSFFs in quantum many-body spin models, within the framework of randomized measurements. Aimed to probe dynamical properties of quantum many-body systems, our scheme employs statistical correlations of local random operations which are applied at different times in a single experiment. Our protocol provides a unified test bed to probe many-body quantum chaotic behavior, thermalization, and many-body localization in closed quantum systems which we illustrate with numerical simulations for Hamiltonian and Floquet many-body spin systems.
In this perspective we discuss verification of quantum devices in the context of specific examples formulated as proposed experiments. Our first example is verification of analog quantum simulators ...as Hamiltonian learning, where the input Hamiltonian as the design goal is compared with the parent Hamiltonian for the quantum states prepared on the device. The second example discusses cross-device verification on the quantum level (i.e., by comparing quantum states prepared on different quantum devices). We focus in particular on protocols using randomized measurements, and we propose establishing a central data repository, where existing experimental devices and platforms can be compared. In our final example, we address verification of the output of a quantum device from a computer science perspective, addressing the question of how a user of a quantum processor can be certain of the correctness of its output, and propose minimal demonstrations on present-day devices.
Abstract
We propose an ordered set of experimentally accessible conditions for detecting entanglement in mixed states. The
k
-th condition involves comparing moments of the partially transposed ...density operator up to order
k
. Remarkably, the union of all moment inequalities reproduces the Peres-Horodecki criterion for detecting entanglement. Our empirical studies highlight that the first four conditions already detect mixed state entanglement reliably in a variety of quantum architectures. Exploiting symmetries can help to further improve their detection capabilities. We also show how to estimate moment inequalities based on local random measurements of single state copies (classical shadows) and derive statistically sound confidence intervals as a function of the number of performed measurements. Our analysis includes the experimentally relevant situation of drifting sources, i.e. non-identical, but independent, state copies.
Abstract
Information scrambling, which is the spread of local information through a system’s many-body degrees of freedom, is an intrinsic feature of many-body dynamics. In quantum systems, the ...out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) quantifies information scrambling. Motivated by experiments that have measured the OTOC at infinite temperature and a theory proposal to measure the OTOC at finite temperature using the thermofield double state, we describe a protocol to measure the OTOC in a finite temperature spin chain that is realized approximately as one half of the ground state of two moderately-sized coupled spin chains. We consider a spin Hamiltonian with particle–hole symmetry, for which we show that the OTOC can be measured without needing sign-reversal of the Hamiltonian. We describe a protocol to mitigate errors in the estimated OTOC, arising from the finite approximation of the system to the thermofield double state. We show that our protocol is also robust to main sources of decoherence in experiments.
Abstract
We present a toolbox to probe quantum many-body states implemented on Rydberg-atoms quantum hardware via randomized measurements. We illustrate the efficacy of this measurement toolbox in ...the context of probing entanglement, via the estimation of the purity, and of verifying a ground-state preparation using measurements of the Hamiltonian variance. To achieve this goal, we develop and discuss in detail a protocol to realize independent, local unitary rotations. We benchmark the protocol by investigating the ground state of the one-dimensional Su–Schrieffer–Heeger model, recently realized on a chain of Rydberg atom, and the state resulting after a sudden quench in a staggered
XY
chain. We probe the robustness of our toolbox by taking into account experimental imperfections, such as pulse fluctuations and measurement errors.
Abstract
This work aims at giving Trotter errors in digital quantum simulation (DQS) of collective spin systems an interpretation in terms of quantum chaos of the kicked top. In particular, for DQS ...of such systems, regular dynamics of the kicked top ensures convergence of the Trotterized time evolution, while chaos in the top, which sets in above a sharp threshold value of the Trotter step size, corresponds to the proliferation of Trotter errors. We show the possibility to analyze this phenomenology in a wide variety of experimental realizations of the kicked top, ranging from single atomic spins to trapped-ion quantum simulators which implement DQS of all-to-all interacting spin-1/2 systems. These platforms thus enable in-depth studies of Trotter errors and their relation to signatures of quantum chaos, including the growth of out-of-time-ordered correlators.
When a quantum system initialized in a product state is subjected to either coherent or incoherent dynamics, the entropy of any of its connected partitions generically increases as a function of ...time, signalling the inevitable spreading of (quantum) information throughout the system. Here, we show that, in the presence of continuous symmetries and under ubiquitous experimental conditions, symmetry-resolved information spreading is inhibited due to the competition of coherent and incoherent dynamics: in given quantum number sectors, entropy decreases as a function of time, signalling dynamical purification. Such dynamical purification bridges between two distinct short and intermediate time regimes, characterized by a log-volume and log-area entropy law, respectively. It is generic to symmetric quantum evolution, and as such occurs for different partition geometry and topology, and classes of (local) Liouville dynamics. We then develop a protocol to measure symmetry-resolved entropies and negativities in synthetic quantum systems based on the random unitary toolbox, and demonstrate the generality of dynamical purification using experimental data from trapped ion experiments Brydges et al., Science 364, 260 (2019). Our work shows that symmetry plays a key role as a magnifying glass to characterize many-body dynamics in open quantum systems, and, in particular, in noisy-intermediate scale quantum devices.
In ergodic many-body quantum systems, locally encoded quantum information becomes, in the course of time evolution, inaccessible to local measurements. This concept of "scrambling" is currently of ...intense research interest, entailing a deep understanding of many-body dynamics such as the processes of chaos and thermalization. Here, we present first experimental demonstrations of quantum information scrambling on a 10-qubit trapped-ion quantum simulator representing a tunable long-range interacting spin system, by estimating out-of-time ordered correlators (OTOCs) through randomized measurements. We also analyze the role of decoherence in our system by comparing our measurements to numerical simulations and by measuring Rényi entanglement entropies.
Entanglement is the crucial ingredient of quantum many-body physics, and characterizing and quantifying entanglement in the closed-system dynamics of quantum simulators remains a challenge in today’s ...era of intermediate-scale quantum devices. Here we discuss an efficient tomographic protocol for reconstructing reduced density matrices and entanglement spectra for spin systems. The key step is a parametrization of the reduced density matrix in terms of an entanglement Hamiltonian involving only quasilocal few-body terms. This ansatz is fitted to, and can be independently verified from, a small number of randomized measurements. By analysing data from trapped-ion quantum simulators for quench dynamics of a one-dimensional long-range Ising model, we demonstrate the ability of the protocol to measure the time evolution of the entanglement spectrum, in agreement with theoretical expectations. Furthermore, we develop the protocol as a testbed for predictions of entanglement structure in quantum field theories, which we illustrate for conformal field theory in quench dynamics, as well as the Bisognano–Wichmann theorem for ground states. In theoretical simulations, we demonstrate favourable scaling of sampling efficiency with subsystem size. Although the post-processing might ultimately be exponential, our protocol addresses the bottleneck of exponential sampling complexity in the investigation of entanglement structure in quantum simulation, and brings subsystems of tens of spins into reach for present experimentsEntanglement is central to theories of quantum many-body systems but is very resource intensive to measure. A protocol based on a quasilocal parametrization of physical states allows entanglement structures to be studied using very few measurements.