Quantum Physics

Neural networks are computing models that have been leading progress in Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. In parallel, the first small scale quantum computing devices have become available in recent years, paving the way for the development of a new paradigm in information processing. Here we give an overview of the most recent proposals aimed at bringing together these ongoing revolutions, and particularly at implementing the key functionalities of artificial neural networks on quantum architectures. We highlight the exciting perspectives in this context and discuss the potential role of near term quantum hardware in the quest for quantum machine learning advantage.

Bosonic modes have wide applications in various quantum technologies, such as optical photons for quantum communication, magnons in spin ensembles for quantum information storage and mechanical modes for reversible microwave-to-optical quantum transduction. There is emerging interest in utilizing bosonic modes for quantum information processing, with circuit quantum electrodynamics (circuit QED) as one of the leading architectures. Quantum information can be encoded into subspaces of a bosonic superconducting cavity mode with long coherence time. However, standard Gaussian operations (e.g., beam splitting and two-mode squeezing) are insufficient for universal quantum computing. The major challenge is to introduce additional nonlinear control beyond Gaussian operations without adding significant bosonic loss or decoherence. Here we review recent advances in universal control of a single bosonic code with superconducting circuits, including unitary control, quantum feedback control, driven-dissipative control and holonomic dissipative control. Various approaches to entangling different bosonic modes are also discussed.

In an abstract sense, quantum data hiding is the manifestation of the fact that two classes of quantum measurements can perform very differently in the task of binary quantum state discrimination. We investigate this phenomenon in the context of continuous variable quantum systems. First, we look at the celebrated case of data hiding 'against' the set of local operations and classical communication. While previous studies have placed upper bounds on its maximum efficiency in terms of the local dimension and are thus not applicable to continuous variable systems, we tackle this latter case by establishing more general bounds that rely solely on the local mean photon number of the states employed. Along the way, we perform a quantitative analysis of the error introduced by the non-ideal Braunstein--Kimble quantum teleportation protocol, determining how much two-mode squeezing and local detection efficiency is needed in order to teleport an arbitrary local state of known mean energy with a prescribed accuracy. Finally, following a seminal proposal by Winter, we look at data hiding against the set of Gaussian operations and classical computation, providing the first example of a relatively simple scheme that works with a single mode only. The states employed can be generated from a two-mode squeezed vacuum by local photon counting; the larger the squeezing, the higher the efficiency of the scheme.

We demonstrate and verify quantum detector tomography of a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) in a multiplexing scheme which permits measurement of up to 71000 photons per input pulse. We reconstruct the positive operator valued measure (POVM) of this device in the low photon-number regime, and use the extracted parameters to show the POVMs spanning the whole dynamic range of the device. We verify this by finding the mean photon number of a bright state. Our work shows that a reliable quantum description of large-scale SNSPD devices is possible, and should be applicable to other multiplexing configurations.

Superconducting nanostrip photon detectors have been used as single photon detectors, which can discriminate only photons' presence or absence. It has recently been found that they can discriminate the number of photons by analyzing the output signal waveform, and they are expected to be used in various fields, especially in optical quantum information processing. Here, we improve the photon-number-resolving performance for light with a high-average photon number by pattern matching of the output signal waveform. Furthermore, we estimate the positive-operator-valued measure of the detector by a quantum detector tomography. The result shows that the device has photon-number-resolving performance up to five photons without any multiplexing or arraying, indicating that it is useful as a photon-number-resolving detector.

We investigate, both analytically and numerically, the quantum dynamics of a planar (2D) rigid rotor subject to suddenly switched-on or switched-off concurrent orienting and aligning interactions. We find that the time-evolution of the post-switch populations as well as of the expectation values of orientation and alignment reflects the spectral properties and the eigensurface topology of the planar pendulum eigenproblem established in our earlier work [Frontiers in Physics 2, 37 (2014); Eur. Phys. J. D 71, 149 (2017)]. This finding opens the possibility to examine the topological properties of the eigensurfaces experimentally as well as provides the means to make use of these properties for controlling the rotor dynamics in the laboratory.

We characterize excited state quantum phase transitions in the two dimensional limit of the vibron model with the quantum fidelity susceptibility, comparing the obtained results with the information provided by the participation ratio. As an application, we perform fits using a four-body algebraic Hamiltonian to bending vibrational data for several molecular species and, using the optimized eigenvalues and eigenstates, we locate the eigenstate closest to the barrier to linearity and determine the linear or bent character of the different overtones.

Non-Hermitian systems with parity-time ( PT ) symmetry give rise to exceptional points (EPs) with exceptional properties that arise due to the coalescence of eigenvectors. Such systems have been extensively explored in the classical domain, where second or higher order EPs have been proposed or realized. In contrast, quantum information studies of PT -symmetric systems have been confined to systems with a two-dimensional Hilbert space. Here by using a single-photon interferometry setup, we simulate quantum dynamics of a four-dimensional PT -symmetric system across a fourth-order exceptional point. By tracking the coherent, non-unitary evolution of the density matrix of the system in PT -symmetry unbroken and broken regions, we observe the entropy dynamics for both the entire system, and the gain and loss subsystems. Our setup is scalable to the higher-dimensional PT -symmetric systems, and our results point towards the rich dynamics and critical properties.

We study supervised learning algorithms in which a quantum device is used to perform a computational subroutine - either for prediction via probability estimation, or to compute a kernel via estimation of quantum states overlap. We design implementations of these quantum subroutines using Boson Sampling architectures in linear optics, supplemented by adaptive measurements. We then challenge these quantum algorithms by deriving classical simulation algorithms for the tasks of output probability estimation and overlap estimation. We obtain different classical simulability regimes for these two computational tasks in terms of the number of adaptive measurements and input photons. In both cases, our results set explicit limits to the range of parameters for which a quantum advantage can be envisaged with adaptive linear optics compared to classical machine learning algorithms: we show that the number of input photons and the number of adaptive measurements cannot be simultaneously small compared to the number of modes. Interestingly, our analysis leaves open the possibility of a near-term quantum advantage with a single adaptive measurement.

We address the relation between quantum metrological resolution and coherence. We examine this dependence in two manners: we develop a quantum Wiener-Kintchine theorem for a suitable model of quantum ruler, and we compute the Fisher information. The two methods have the virtue of including both the contributions of probe and measurement on an equal footing. We illustrate this approach with several examples of linear and nonlinear metrology. Finally, we optimize resolution regarding coherence as a finite resource.