Research drawing on the quantum “anti-butterfly effect” solves a long-standing experimental problem in physics and establishes a method for benchmarking quantum computer performance.
Bin Yan, a quantum theorist at Los Alamos National, said, “Using the simple, robust protocol we developed, we can determine whether quantum computers can process information effectively, and that information loss is common in other complex quantum systems.” also applies.” the laboratory.
Yan is the corresponding author of the paper on Scrambling Benchmarking Information which is published today in physical review paper, “Our protocol measures information in a quantum system and clearly distinguishes it from spurious positive signals in a noisy background due to quantum decoherence.”
Noise in the form of clutter erodes all quantum information in a complex system such as a quantum computer as it interacts with the surrounding environment. Scrambling through quantum chaos, on the other hand, spreads information throughout the system, protecting it and allowing it to be retrieved.
Coherence is a quantum state that enables quantum computing, and decoherence refers to the loss of that state as information leaks into the surrounding environment.
“Our method, which draws on the quantum anti-butterfly effect discovered two years ago, evolves a system back and forth through time in a single loop, so we can use it to measure the dynamics, including a quantum computer, from time to time. systems. And quantum simulators use cold atoms,” Yan said.
The Los Alamos team demonstrated the protocol with simulations on IBM cloud-based quantum computers.
The inability to separate anomaly from information scrambling has hindered experimental research into the phenomenon. Studied for the first time in black-hole physics, information scrambling has proven relevant in a wide range of research fields, including quantum chaos in many-body systems, phase transitions, quantum machine learning and quantum computing. Experimental platforms for the study of information scrambling include superconductors, trapped ions, and cloud-based quantum computers.
Practical application of the quantum anti-butterfly effect
Yan and co-author Nikolai Sinitsyn published a paper in 2020 proving that developing quantum processes backwards on a quantum computer to damage information in the simulated past results in little change when returning to the present. In contrast, a classical-physics system irreversibly erases information during a back-and-forward time loop.
Building on this finding, Yan, Sinitsin and co-author Joseph Harris, a University of Edinburgh graduate student who worked on the current paper as a participant in the Los Alamos Quantum Computing Summer School, developed the protocol. It creates a quantum system and subsystem, develops the entire system forward in time, causes a change to a different subsystem, then develops the system backwards for the same amount of time. Measuring the overlap of information between two subsystems reveals how much information is preserved and how much is lost by scrambling.
Story Source:
material provided by DOE/Los Alamos National Laboratory, Note: Content can be edited for style and length.
