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The Dirac equation is critical to understanding the universe, and plays an important role in technological advancements. Compared to the stationary solution, the dynamical evolution under the Dirac Hamiltonian is less understood, exemplified by Zitterbewegung. Although originally predicted in relativistic quantum mechanics, Zitterbewegung can also appear in some classical systems, which leads to the important question of whether Zitterbewegung of Dirac Fermions is underlain by a more fundamental and universal interference behavior without classical analogs. We here reveal such an interference pattern in phase space, which underlies but goes beyond Zitterbewegung, and whose nonclassicality is manifested by the negativity of the phase-space quasiprobability distribution, and the associated pseudospin-momentum entanglement. We confirm this discovery by numerical simulation and an on-chip experiment, where a superconducting qubit and a quantized microwave field respectively emulate the internal and external degrees of freedom of a Dirac particle. The measured quasiprobability negativities well agree with the numerical simulation. Besides being of fundamental importance, the demonstrated nonclassical effects are useful in quantum technology., Comment: 18 pages, 15 figures

Quantum entanglement between an interfering particle and a detector for acquiring the which-path information plays a central role for enforcing Bohr's complementarity principle. However, the quantitative relation between this entanglement and the fringe visibility remains untouched upon for an initial mixed state. Here we find an equality for quantifying this relation. Our equality characterizes how well the interference pattern can be preserved when an interfering particle, initially carrying a definite amount of coherence, is entangled, to a certain degree, with a which-path detector. This equality provides a connection between entanglement and interference in the unified framework of coherence, revealing the quantitative entanglement-interference complementarity. We experimentally demonstrate this relation with a superconducting circuit, where a resonator serves as a which-path detector for an interfering qubit. The measured fringe visibility of the qubit's Ramsey signal and the qubit-resonator entanglement exhibit a complementary relation, in well agreement with the theoretical prediction., 19 pages, 9 figures, 1 table

Operator spreading, often characterized by out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs), is one of the central concepts in quantum many-body physics. However, measuring OTOCs is experimentally challenging due to the requirement of reversing the time evolution of systems. Here we apply Floquet engineering to investigate operator spreading in a superconducting 10-qubit chain. Floquet engineering provides an effective way to tune the coupling strength between nearby qubits, which is used to demonstrate quantum walks with tunable couplings, reversed time evolution, and the measurement of OTOCs. A clear light-cone-like operator propagation is observed in the system with multiple excitations, and has a nearly equal velocity as the single-particle quantum walk. For the butterfly operator that is nonlocal (local) under the Jordan-Wigner transformation, the OTOCs show distinct behaviors with (without) a signature of information scrambling in the near integrable system., 6+12 pages, 4 figures

We introduce a method which based on Bell inequalities, to study quantum phase transitions. By using the non-linear programming, we compare two different kinds of Bell inequalities, the original Bell inequality and Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) inequality. And we find that the original Bell inequality is more accurate in detecting the Bell non-locality. By defining the maximal violation of Bell inequalities, we calculate two kinds of transitions, the one is magnetic transition in the spin- $\frac {1}{2}$ XX model and the other is topological transition in the Kitaev honeycomb model. The critical points are detected successfully. Compared with traditional methods, our method requires no prior knowledge of order parameters and it is base-free.

Many-body localization (MBL) describes a quantum phase where an isolated interacting system subject to sufficient disorder displays non-ergodic behavior, evading thermal equilibrium that occurs under its own dynamics. Previously, the thermalization-MBL transition has been largely characterized with the growth of disorder. Here, we explore a new axis, reporting on an energy resolved MBL transition using a 19-qubit programmable superconducting processor, which enables precise control and flexibility of both disorder strength and initial state preparations. We observe that the onset of localization occurs at different disorder strengths, with distinguishable energy scales, by measuring time-evolved observables and many-body wavefunctions related quantities. Our results open avenues for the experimental exploration of many-body mobility edges in MBL systems, whose existence is widely debated due to system size finiteness, and where exact simulations in classical computers become unfeasible., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures + supplementary information

Simulating response properties of molecules is crucial for interpreting experimental spectroscopies and accelerating materials design. However, it remains a long-standing computational challenge for electronic structure methods on classical computers. While quantum computers hold the promise to solve this problem more efficiently in the long run, existing quantum algorithms requiring deep quantum circuits are infeasible for near-term noisy quantum processors. Here, we introduce a pragmatic variational quantum response (VQR) algorithm for response properties, which circumvents the need for deep quantum circuits. Using this algorithm, we report the first simulation of linear response properties of molecules including dynamic polarizabilities and absorption spectra on a superconducting quantum processor. Our results indicate that a large class of important dynamical properties such as Green's functions are within the reach of near-term quantum hardware using this algorithm in combination with suitable error mitigation techniques., 22 pages, 4 figures

The variational preparation of complex quantum states using the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is of fundamental interest, and becomes a promising application of quantum computers. Here, we systematically study the performance of QAOA for preparing ground states of target Hamiltonians near the critical points of their quantum phase transitions, and generating Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states. We reveal that the performance of QAOA is related to the translational invariance of the target Hamiltonian: Without the translational symmetry, for instance due to the open boundary condition (OBC) or randomness in the system, the QAOA becomes less efficient. We then propose a generalized QAOA assisted by the parameterized resource Hamiltonian (PRH-QAOA), to achieve a better performance. In addition, based on the PRH-QAOA, we design a low-depth quantum circuit beyond one-dimensional geometry, to generate GHZ states with perfect fidelity. The experimental realization of the proposed scheme for generating GHZ states on Rydberg-dressed atoms is discussed. Our work paves the way for performing QAOA on programmable quantum processors without translational symmetry, especially for recently developed two-dimensional quantum processors with OBC., Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures

Sequential sharing of nonlocal correlation is inherently related to its application. We address the question as to how many observers can share the nonlocal advantage of quantum coherence (NAQC) in a $(d\times d)$-dimensional state, where $d$ is a prime or a power of a prime. We first analyze the trade-off between disturbance and information gain of the general $d$-dimensional unsharp measurements. Then in a scenario where multiple Alices perform unsharp measurements on one party of the state sequentially and independently and a single Bob measures coherence of the conditional states on the other party, we show that at most one Alice can demonstrate NAQC with Bob. This limit holds even when considering the weak measurements with optimal pointer states. These results may shed light on the interplay between nonlocal correlations and quantum measurements on high-dimensional systems and the hierarchy of different quantum correlations., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

In this study, we introduce an online public quantum computation platform, named as ScQ, based on a 1D array of a 10-qubit superconducting processor. Single-qubit rotation gates can be performed on each qubit. Controlled-NOT gates between nearest-neighbor sites on the 1D array of 10 qubits are available. We show the online preparation and verification of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states of up to 10 qubits through this platform for all possible blocks of qubits in the chain. The graphical user interface and quantum assembly language methods are presented to achieve the above tasks, which rely on a parameter scanning feature implemented on ScQ. The performance of this quantum computation platform, such as fidelities of logic gates and details of the superconducting device, are presented.

Recent numerical and experimental works have revealed a disorder-free many-body localization (MBL) in an interacting system subjecting to a linear potential, known as the Stark MBL. The conventional MBL, induced by disorder, has been widely studied by using quantum simulations based on superconducting circuits. Here, we consider the Stark MBL in two types of superconducting circuits, i.e., the 1D array of superconducting qubits, and the circuit where non-local interactions between qubits are mediated by a resonator bus. We calculate the entanglement entropy and participate entropy of the highly-excited eigenstates, and obtain the lower bound of the critical linear potential $\gamma_{c}$, using the finite-size scaling collapse. Moreover, we study the non-equilibrium properties of the Stark MBL. In particular, we observe an anomalous relaxation of the imbalance, dominated by the power-law decay $t^{-\xi}$. The exponent $\xi$ satisfies $\xi\propto|\gamma-\gamma_{c}|^{\nu}$ when $\gamma, Comment: 9+7 pages, 10+7 figures, 2 tables

We demonstrate that multipartite entanglement, witnessed by the quantum Fisher information (QFI), can characterize topological quantum phase transitions in the spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ toric code model on a square lattice with external fields. We show that the QFI density of the ground state can be written in terms of the expectation values of gauge-invariant Wilson loops for different sizes of square regions and identify $\mathbb{Z}_2$ topological order by its scaling behavior. Furthermore, we use this multipartite entanglement witness to investigate thermalization and disorder-assisted stabilization of topological order after a quantum quench. Moreover, with an upper bound of the QFI, we demonstrate the absence of finite-temperature topological order in the 2D toric code model in the thermodynamic limit. Our results provide insights to topological phases, which are robust against external disturbances, and are candidates for topologically protected quantum computation., 6+4 pages, 3+0 figures

We experimentally study the ergodic dynamics of a 1D array of 12 superconducting qubits with a transverse field, and identify the regimes of strong and weak thermalization with different initial states. We observe convergence of the local observable to its thermal expectation value in the strong-thermalizaion regime. For weak thermalization, the dynamics of local observable exhibits an oscillation around the thermal value, which can only be attained by the time average. We also demonstrate that the entanglement entropy and concurrence can characterize the regimes of strong and weak thermalization. Our work provides an essential step towards a generic understanding of thermalization in quantum systems., Comment: 6+6 pages, 4+8 figures

Quantum walks are the quantum analogs of classical random walks, which allow for the simulation of large-scale quantum many-body systems and the realization of universal quantum computation without time-dependent control. We experimentally demonstrate quantum walks of one and two strongly correlated microwave photons in a one-dimensional array of 12 superconducting qubits with short-range interactions. First, in one-photon quantum walks, we observed the propagation of the density and correlation of the quasiparticle excitation of the superconducting qubit and quantum entanglement between qubit pairs. Second, when implementing two-photon quantum walks by exciting two superconducting qubits, we observed the fermionization of strongly interacting photons from the measured time-dependent long-range anticorrelations, representing the antibunching of photons with attractive interactions. The demonstration of quantum walks on a quantum processor, using superconducting qubits as artificial atoms and tomographic readout, paves the way to quantum simulation of many-body phenomena and universal quantum computation.

Quantum coherence and quantum correlations lie in the center of quantum information science, since they both are considered as fundamental reasons for significant features of quantum mechanics different from classical mechanics. We present a group of complementary relations for quantum coherence and quantum correlations; specifically, we focus on thermal discord and conditional information in scenarios of multiple measurements. We show that the summation of quantum coherence quantified in different bases has a lower bound, resulting from entropic uncertainty relations with multiple measurements. Similar results are also obtained for thermal discord and for post-measurement conditional information with multiple measurements in a multipartite system. These results indicate the general applications of the uncertainty principle to various concepts of quantum information., Comment: 7 pages

Simulation of quantum materials is a significant application of quantum computers. In contrast with the unitary operation which can be realized naturally on a quantum computer, the implementation of nonunitary operation, widely used in classical approaches, needs special designing. Here, by application of Grover’s algorithm, we extend the probabilistic method of implementing nonunitary operation and show that it can promote success probability without fidelity decreasing. This method can be applied to problems of imaginary time evolution and contraction of tensor networks on a quantum computer.

Multipartite entangled states are significant resources for both quantum information processing and quantum metrology. In particular, non-Gaussian entangled states are predicted to achieve a higher sensitivity of precision measurements than Gaussian states. On the basis of metrological sensitivity, the conventional linear Ramsey squeezing parameter (RSP) efficiently characterises the Gaussian entangled atomic states but fails for much wider classes of highly sensitive non-Gaussian states. These complex non-Gaussian entangled states can be classified by the nonlinear squeezing parameter (NLSP), as a generalisation of the RSP with respect to nonlinear observables, and identified via the Fisher information. However, the NLSP has never been measured experimentally. Using a 19-qubit programmable superconducting processor, here we report the characterisation of multiparticle entangled states generated during its nonlinear dynamics. First, selecting 10 qubits, we measure the RSP and the NLSP by single-shot readouts of collective spin operators in several different directions. Then, by extracting the Fisher information of the time-evolved state of all 19 qubits, we observe a large metrological gain of 9.89$^{+0.28}_{-0.29}$ dB over the standard quantum limit, indicating a high level of multiparticle entanglement for quantum-enhanced phase sensitivity. Benefiting from high-fidelity full controls and addressable single-shot readouts, the superconducting processor with interconnected qubits provides an ideal platform for engineering and benchmarking non-Gaussian entangled states that are useful for quantum-enhanced metrology., 13+12 pages, 10+2 figures

Thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) is superior for integrated nanophotonics due to its outstanding properties in nearly all aspects: strong second-order nonlinearity, fast and efficient electro-optic effects, wide transparency window, and little two photon absorption and free carrier scattering. Together, they permit highly integrated nanophotonic circuits capable of complex photonic processing by incorporating disparate elements on the same chip. Yet, there has to be a demonstration that synergizes those superior properties for system advantage. Here we demonstrate such a chip that capitalizes on TFLNs favorable ferroelectricity, high second-order nonlinearity, and strong electro-optic effects. It consists of a monolithic circuit integrating a Z-cut, quasi-phase matched microring with high quality factor and a phase modulator used in active feedback control. By Pound-Drever-Hall locking, it realizes stable frequency doubling at about 50% conversion with only milliwatt pump, marking the highest by far among all nanophotonic platforms with milliwatt pumping. Our demonstration addresses a long-outstanding challenge facing cavity-based optical processing, including frequency conversion, frequency comb generation, and all-optical switching, whose stable performance is hindered by photorefractive or thermal effects. Our results further establish TFLN as an excellent material capable of optical multitasking, as desirable to build multi-functional chip devices., 11 pages, 6 figures, jchen59@stevens.edu yhuang5@stevens.edu

No-cloning theorem forbids perfect cloning of an unknown quantum state. A universal quantum cloning machine (UQCM), capable of producing two copies of any input qubit with the optimal fidelity, is of fundamental interest and has applications in quantum information processing. This is enabled by delicately tailored nonclassical correlations between the input qubit and the copying qubits, which distinguish the UQCM from a classical counterpart, but whose experimental demonstrations are still lacking. We here implement the UQCM in a superconducting circuit, and investigate these correlations. The measured entanglements well agree with our theoretical prediction that they are independent of the input state and thus constitute a universal quantum behavior of the UQCM that was not previously revealed. Another feature of our experiment is the realization of deterministic and individual cloning, in contrast to previously demonstrated UQCMs, which either were probabilistic or did not constitute true cloning of individual qubits., 11 pages, 7 figures, 1 table

Lattice gauge theories (LGTs) are one of the most fundamental subjects in many-body physics, and has recently attracted considerable research interests in quantum simulations. Here we experimentally investigate the emergent $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge invariance in a 1D superconducting circuit with 10 transmon qubits. By precisely adjusting staggered longitudinal and transverse fields to each qubit, we construct an effective Hamiltonian containing an LGT and gauge-broken terms. The corresponding matter sector can exhibit a localization, and there also exists a 3-qubit operator, of which the expectation value can retain nonzero for a long time in low-energy regimes. The above localization can be regarded as the confinement of matter fields, and the 3-body operator is the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge generator. These experimental results demonstrate that, despite the absence of gauge structure in the effective Hamiltonian, $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge invariance can still emerge in low-energy regimes. Our work provides a method for both theoretically and experimentally studying the rich physics in quantum many-body systems with emergent gauge invariance., Comment: 7+9 pages, 4+6 figures

The conversion and interaction between quantum signals at a single-photon level are essential for scalable quantum photonic information technology. Using a fully-optimized, periodically-poled lithium niobate microring, we demonstrate ultra-efficient sum-frequency generation on chip. The external quantum efficiency reaches $(65\pm3)\%$ with only $(104\pm4)$ $\mu$W pump power, improving the state-of-the-art by over one order of magnitude. At the peak conversion, $3\times10^{-5}$ noise photon is created during the cavity lifetime, which meets the requirement of quantum applications using single-photon pulses. Using pump and signal in single-photon coherent states, we directly measure the conversion probability produced by a single pump photon to be $10^{-5}$ -- breaking the record by 100 times -- and the photon-photon coupling strength to be 9.1 MHz. Our results mark a new milestone toward quantum nonlinear optics at the ultimate single photon limit, creating new background in highly integrated photonics and quantum optical computing., Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, email: jchen59@stevens.edu & yhuang5@stevens.edu

We study the quantum thermalization and information scrambling dynamics of an experimentally realizable quantum spin model with homogeneous XX-type all-to-all interactions and random local potentials. We identify the thermalization-localization transition by changing the disorder strength, under a proper all-to-all interaction strength. The scrambling dynamics in the localization phase shows novel behaviors distinct from that of local models. The operator scrambling grows almost equally fast in both phases. In the thermal phase, we show there exhibits fast scrambling without appealing to the semi-classical limit. We also briefly discuss the experimental realization of the model using superconducting qubit quantum simulators., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures

Understanding various phenomena in non-equilibrium dynamics of closed quantum many-body systems, such as quantum thermalization, information scrambling, and nonergodic dynamics, is a crucial for modern physics. Using a ladder-type superconducting quantum processor, we perform analog quantum simulations of both the $XX$ ladder and one-dimensional (1D) $XX$ model. By measuring the dynamics of local observables, entanglement entropy and tripartite mutual information, we signal quantum thermalization and information scrambling in the $XX$ ladder. In contrast, we show that the $XX$ chain, as free fermions on a 1D lattice, fails to thermalize, and local information does not scramble in the integrable channel. Our experiments reveal ergodicity and scrambling in the controllable qubit ladder, and opens the door to further investigations on the thermodynamics and chaos in quantum many-body systems., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, and supplementary materials with 10 pages, 3 tables and 14 figures

Quantum coherence reflects the origin of quantumness and might be capable of extracting the subtle nature of a system. We investigate the ground-state coherence and steered coherence in the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model and show that they detect faithfully the quantum phase transitions of this model. Moreover, we carry out scaling analysis on the coherence and steered coherence by means of the continuous unitary transformation method and it is found that the scaling exponents are uniquely determined by the phase region of this model. These results may provide useful insights into the mechanism underlying quantum criticality in many-body systems., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures

Quantum photon sources of high rate, brightness, and purity are increasingly desirable as quantum information systems are quickly scaled up and applied to many fields. Using a periodically poled lithium niobate microresonator on chip, we demonstrate photon-pair generation at high rates of 8.5 MHz and 36.3 MHz using only 3.4-$\mu$W and 13.4-$\mu$W pump power, respectively, marking orders of magnitude improvement over the state-of-the-art. The measured coincidence to accidental ratio is well above 100 at those high rates and reaches $14,682\pm 4427$ at a lower pump power. The same chip enables heralded single-photon generation at tens of megahertz rates, each with low auto-correlation $g^{(2)}_{H}(0)=0.008$ and $0.097$ for the microwatt pumps. Such distinct performance, facilitated by the chip device's noiseless and giant optical nonlinearity, will contribute to the forthcoming pervasive adoption of quantum optical information technologies., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures

Accurately predicting response properties of molecules such as the dynamic polarizability and hyperpolarizability using quantum mechanics has been a long-standing challenge with widespread applications in material and drug design. Classical simulation techniques in quantum chemistry are hampered by the exponential growth of the many-electron Hilbert space as the system size increases. In this work, we propose an algorithm for computing linear and nonlinear molecular response properties on quantum computers, by first reformulating the target property into a symmetric expression more suitable for quantum computation via introducing a set of auxiliary quantum states, and then determining these auxiliary states via solving the corresponding linear systems of equations on quantum computers. On one hand, we prove that using the quantum linear system algorithm [Harrow et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 150502 (2009)] as a subroutine the proposed algorithm scales only polynomially in the system size instead of the dimension of the exponentially large Hilbert space, and hence achieves an exponential speedup over existing classical algorithms. On the other hand, we introduce a variational hybrid quantum-classical variant of the proposed algorithm, which is more practical for near-term quantum devices., Comment: 7 pages

Quantum information scrambling under the dynamics of a closed many-body system is of wide interest. The tripartite mutual information (TMI) can quantify the scrambling via its stable negative value under temporal evolution. Here, we study the quench dynamics of the TMI in a nonintegrable Ising model with different initial states in the regimes of strong and weak thermalization. Our numerical results show that the most efficient scrambling can occur when the inverse temperatures of initial states are near zero and in the regime of strong thermalization, and weak thermalization accompanies slow scrambling. We then present an experimental protocol for observing strong and weak thermalization in a one-dimensional array of superconducting qubits, based on which the relation between scrambling and the degree of thermalization revealed in this work can be directly verified by superconducting quantum simulators. The inevitable decoherence effects in real situations are also analyzed, paving the way for faithful quantum simulations on actual experimental platforms.

The Bloch oscillation (BO) and Wannier-Stark localization (WSL) are fundamental concepts about metal-insulator transitions in condensed matter physics. These phenomena have also been observed in semiconductor superlattices and simulated in platforms such as photonic waveguide arrays and cold atoms. Here, we report experimental investigation of BOs and WSL simulated with a 5-qubit programmable superconducting processor, of which the effective Hamiltonian is an isotropic $XY$ spin chain. When applying a linear potential to the system by properly tuning all individual qubits, we observe that the propagation of a single spin on the chain is suppressed. It tends to oscillate near the neighborhood of their initial positions, which demonstrates the characteristics of BOs and WSL. We verify that the WSL length is inversely correlated to the potential gradient. Benefiting from the precise single-shot simultaneous readout of all qubits in our experiments, we can also investigate the thermal transport, which requires the joint measurement of more than one qubits. The experimental results show that, as an essential characteristic for BOs and WSL, the thermal transport is also blocked under a linear potential. Our experiment would be scalable to more superconducting qubits for simulating various of out-of-equilibrium problems in quantum many-body systems., 8+12 pages, 4 figures

We investigate the basic constraint on amplifying the asymmetry in quantum states with correlated catalysts. Here a correlated catalyst is a finite-dimensional auxiliary, which exactly preserves its reduced state while allowed to become correlated to the quantum system. Interestingly, we prove that under translationally invariant operations, catalysts in pure states are useless in any state transformation, while with a correlated catalyst in a mixed state, one can enlarge the set of accessible states from an initially asymmetric state. Moreover, we show that the power of a catalyst increases with its dimension, and further, with a large enough catalyst, a qubit state with arbitrarily small amount of asymmetry can be converted to any mixed qubit state. In doing so, we build a bridge between two important results concerning the restrictions on coherence conversion, the no-broadcasting theorem and the catalytic coherence. Our results may also apply to the constraints on coherence evolution in quantum thermodynamics, and to the distribution of timing information between quantum clocks., Almost published version

We investigate quantum teleportation in the two-copy setting based on GHZ measurement and propose the detailed protocol. The output state after the teleportation is analyzed, and the protocol is proved to be trace preserving. The general expression of the optimal teleportation fidelity is derived. The optimal teleportation fidelity is shown to be a linear function of two-copy fully entangled fraction, which is invariant under local unitary transformations. At last, we show two-copy teleportation based on GHZ measurement can be better than one-copy teleportation by an explicit example, which is amenable to demonstration in experiments. Our study is significant for improving the fidelity of teleportation for some limited resource which cannot be significantly distilled. Moreover, it can inspire us to find many other more efficient protocols for teleportation.

We focus on the many-body eigenstates across a localization-delocalization phase transition. To characterize the robustness of the eigenstates, we introduce the eigenstate overlaps $\mathcal{O}$ with respect to the different boundary conditions. In the ergodic phase, the average of eigenstate overlaps $\bar{\mathcal{O}}$ is exponential decay with the increase of the system size indicating the fragility of its eigenstates, and this can be considered as an eigenstate-version butterfly effect of the chaotic systems. For localized systems, $\bar{\mathcal{O}}$ is almost size-independent showing the strong robustness of the eigenstates and the broken of eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. In addition, we find that the response of eigenstates to the change of boundary conditions in many-body localized systems is identified with the single-particle wave functions in Anderson localized systems. This indicates that the eigenstates of the many-body localized systems, as the many-body wave functions, may be independent of each other. We demonstrate that this is consistent with the existence of a large number of quasilocal integrals of motion in the many-body localized phase. Our results provide a new method to study localized and delocalized systems from the perspective of eigenstates., 8 pages, 6 figures

We study the quantum information masking based on isometric linear operators that distribute the information encoded in pure states to the correlations in bipartite states. It is shown that a isometric linear operator can not mask any nonzero measure set of pure states. We present a geometric characterization of the maskable sets, and show that any maskable set must be on a spherical circle in certain Euclidean spaces. Detailed examples and potential applications in such as secret sharing and quantum cryptography are analyzed., 7 pages, 3 figures, comments are welcome!

Entanglement of high-dimensional and multipartite quantum systems offer promising perspectives in quantum information processing. However, the characterization and measure of such kind of entanglement is of great challenge. Here, we consider the overlaps between the maximal quantum mean values and the classical bound of the CHSH inequalities for pairwise-qubit states in two-dimensional subspaces. We show that the concurrence of a pure state in any high-dimensional multipartite system can be equivalently represented by these overlaps. Here, we consider the projections of an arbitrary high-dimensional multipartite state to two-qubit states. We investigate the non-localities of these projected two-qubit sub-states by their violations of CHSH inequalities. From these violations, the overlaps between the maximal quantum mean values and the classical bound of the CHSH inequality, we show that the concurrence of a high-dimensional multipartite pure state can be exactly expressed by these overlaps. We further derive a lower bound of the concurrence for any quantum states, which is tight for pure states. The lower bound not only imposes restriction on the non-locality distributions among the pairwise-qubit states, but also supplies a sufficient condition for distillation of bipartite entanglement. Effective criteria for detecting genuine tripartite entanglement and the lower bound of concurrence for genuine tripartite entanglement are also presented based on such non-localities.

We propose to use the steered quantum coherence (SQC) as a signature of quantum phase transitions (QPTs). By considering various spin chain models, including the transverse-field Ising model, \textit{XY} model, and \textit{XX} model with three-spin interaction, we showed that the SQC and its first-order derivative succeed in signaling different critical points of QPTs. In particular, the SQC method is effective for any spin pair chosen from the chain, and the strength of SQC, in contrast to entanglement and quantum discord, is insensitive to the distance (provided it is not very short) of the tested spins, which makes it convenient for practical use as there is no need for careful choice of two spins in the chain., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures

Quantum simulation in experiments of many-body systems may bring new phenomena which are not well studied theoretically. Motivated by a recent work of quantum simulation on a superconducting ladder circuit, we investigate the rung-pair localization of the Bose-Hubbard ladder model without quenched disorder. Our results show that, in the hard-core limit, there exists a rung-pair localization both at the edges and in the bulk. Using center-of-mass frame, the two-particle system can be mapped to an effective single-particle system with an approximate sub-lattice symmetry. Under the condition of hard-core limit, the effective system is forced to have a defect at the left edge leading to a zero-energy flat band, which is the origin of the rung-pair localization. We also study the multi-particle dynamics of the Bose-Hubbard ladder model, which is beyond the singleparticle picture. In this case, we find that the localization can still survive despite of the existence of interaction between the pairs. Moreover, the numerical results show that the entanglement entropy exhibits a long-time logarithmic growth and the saturated values satisfy a volume law. This phenomenon implies that the interaction plays an important role during the dynamics, although it cannot break the localization. Our results reveal another interesting type of disorder-free localization related to a zero-energy flat band, which is induced by on-site interaction and specific lattice symmetry., Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures

The Loschmidt echo is a useful diagnostic for the perfection of quantum time-reversal process and the sensitivity of quantum evolution to small perturbations. The main challenge for measuring the Loschmidt echo is the time reversal of a quantum evolution. In this work, we demonstrate the measurement of the Loschmidt echo in a superconducting 10-qubit system using Floquet engineering and discuss the imperfection of an initial Bell-state recovery arising from the next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) coupling present in the qubit device. Our results show that the Loschmidt echo is very sensitive to small perturbations during quantum-state evolution, in contrast to the quantities like qubit population that is often considered in the time-reversal experiment. These properties may be employed for the investigation of multiqubit system concerning many-body decoherence and entanglement, etc., especially when devices with reduced or vanishing NNN coupling are used.

We study the quantum nature of non-Bunch-Davies states in de Sitter space by evaluating CHSH inequality on a localized two-atom system. We show that quantum nonlocality can be generated through the Markovian evolution of two-atom, witnessed by a violation of CHSH inequality on its final equilibrium state. We find that the upper bound of inequality violation is determined by different choices of de Sitter-invariant vacua sectors. In particular, with growing Gibbons-Hawking temperature, the CHSH bound degrades monotonously for Bunch-Davies vacuum sector. Due to the intrinsic correlation of non-Bunch-Davies vacua, we find that the related violation of inequality can however drastically increase after certain turning point, and may persist for arbitrarily large environment decoherence. This implies that the CHSH inequality is useful to classify the initial quantum state of the Universe. Finally, we clarify that the witnessed intrinsic correlation of non-Bunch-Davies vacua can be utilized for quantum information applications, e.g., surpassing the Heisenberg uncertainty bound of quantum measurement in de Sitter space., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, final version to appear in Physics Letters B

Quantum coherence and quantum correlations are of fundamental and practical significance for the development of quantum mechanics.They are also cornerstones of quantum computation and quantum communication theory. Searching physically meaningful and mathematically rigorous quantifiers of them are long-standing concerns of the community of quantum information science, and various faithful measures have been introduced so far. We review in this paper the measures of discordlike quantum correlations for bipartite and multipartite systems, the measures of quantum coherence for any single quantum system, and their relationship in different settings. Our aim is to provide a full review about the resource theory of quantum coherence, including its application in many-body systems, and the discordlike quantum correlations which were defined based on the various distance measures of states. We discuss the interrelations between quantum coherence and quantum correlations established in an operational way, and the fundamental characteristics of quantum coherence such as their complementarity under different basis sets, their duality with path information of an interference experiment, their distillation and dilution under different operations, and some new viewpoints of the superiority of the quantum algorithms from the perspective of quantum coherence. Additionally, we review properties of geometric quantum correlations and quantum coherence under noisy quantum channels. Finally, the main progresses for the study of quantum correlations and quantum coherence in the relativistic settings are reviewed. All these results provide an overview for the conceptual implications and basic connections of quantum coherence, quantum correlations, and their potential applications in various related subjects of physics., 82 pages, 8 figures; Final version to be published in Physics Reports

We investigate the quantum estimation on the Hubble parameter of an expanding de Sitter space by quantum metrological techniques. By exploring the dynamics of a freely falling Unruh-DeWitt detector, which interacts with a scalar field coupling to curvature, we calculate the Fisher information (FI) and quantum Fisher information (QFI) for the detector, which bound the highest precision of the estimation on Hubble parameter. In standard Bunch-Davies vacuum, we show that the maxima of FI/QFI are located for particular initial state of probe. Beside its dependence on the evolving time of detector and the energy spacing of atom $\omega$, we show that the maxima of FI/QFI can be significantly enhanced once a proper coupling of scalar field to curvature is chosen. For instance, we show numerically that the estimation in the scenario with minimally/nearly minimally coupling scalar field can always outperform that with conformally coupling scalar field, corresponding to a higher FI/QFI in estimation. Moreover, we find that for general $\alpha-$vacua of de Sitter space, a further improvement of estimation can be achieved, attributed to the squeezed nature of $\alpha-$vacua that heavily constrains the measurement uncertainty. Some implications of our results are also discussed., Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, typos fixed, published version

We investigate two-copy scenario of quantum teleportation based on Bell measurements. The detailed protocol is presented and the general expression of the corresponding optimal teleportation delity is derived, which is given by the two-copy fully entangled fraction that is invariant under local unitary transformations. We prove that under a speci c case of the protocol, which is signi cant for improving the optimal delity, the set of states with their two-copy fully entangled fractions bounded by a threshold value that required for useful two-copy teleportation is convex and compact. Hence the witness operators exist to separate states that are useful for two-copy teleportation from the rest ones. Moreover, we show that the optimal delity of two-copy teleportation surpasses that of the original one copy teleportation., 8 pages, 2 figures

We investigate the nonlocal advantage of quantum coherence (NAQC) and entanglement for two spins coupled via the Heisenberg interaction and under the intrinsic decoherence. Solutions of this decoherence model for the initial spin-1/2 and spin-1 maximally entangled states are obtained, based on which we calculate the NAQC and entanglement. In the weak region of magnetic field, the NAQC behaves as a damped oscillation with the time evolves, while the entanglement decays exponentially (behaves as a damped oscillation) for the spin-1/2 (spin-1) case. Moreover, the decay of both the NAQC and entanglement can be suppressed significantly by tuning the magnetic field and anisotropy of the spin interaction to some decoherence-rate-determined optimal values.

We investigate the single qubit transformations under several typical coherence-free operations, such as, incoherent operation (IO), strictly incoherent operation (SIO), physically incoherent operation (PIO), and coherence preserving operation (CPO). Quantitative connection has been built between IO and SIO in single qubit systems. Moreover, these coherence-free operations have a clear hierarchical relationship in single qubit systems: CPO $\subset$ PIO $\subset$ SIO=IO. A new and explicit proof for the necessary and sufficient condition of single qubit transformation via IO or SIO has been provided, which indicates that SIO with only two Kraus operators are enough to realize this transformation. The transformation regions of single qubits via CPO and PIO are also given. Our method provides a geometric illustration to analyze single qubit coherence transformations by introducing the Bloch sphere depiction of the transformation regions, and tells us how to construct the corresponding coherence-free operations., 12 pages, 6 figures

We propose a scheme of controlling entanglement dynamics of a quantum system by applying the external classical driving field for two atoms separately located in a single-mode photon cavity. It is shown that, with a judicious choice of the classical-driving strength and the atom–photon detuning, the effective atom–photon interaction Hamiltonian can be switched from Jaynes–Cummings model to anti-Jaynes–Cummings model. By tuning the controllable atom–photon interaction induced by the classical field, we illustrate that the evolution trajectory of the Bell-like entanglement states can be manipulated from entanglement-sudden-death to no-entanglement-sudden-death, from no-entanglement-invariant to entanglement-invariant. Furthermore, the robustness of the initial Bell-like entanglement can be improved by the classical driving field in the leaky cavities. This classical-driving-assisted architecture can be easily extensible to multi-atom quantum system for scalability.

Superconducting simulators are used to investigate dynamical phase transitions, revealing their applications in quantum metrology., Nonequilibrium quantum many-body systems, which are difficult to study via classical computation, have attracted wide interest. Quantum simulation can provide insights into these problems. Here, using a programmable quantum simulator with 16 all-to-all connected superconducting qubits, we investigate the dynamical phase transition in the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model with a quenched transverse field. Clear signatures of dynamical phase transitions, merging different concepts of dynamical criticality, are observed by measuring the nonequilibrium order parameter, nonlocal correlations, and the Loschmidt echo. Moreover, near the dynamical critical point, we obtain a spin squeezing of −7.0 ± 0.8 dB, showing multipartite entanglement, useful for measurements with precision fivefold beyond the standard quantum limit. On the basis of the capability of entangling qubits simultaneously and the accurate single-shot readout of multiqubit states, this superconducting quantum simulator can be used to study other problems in nonequilibrium quantum many-body systems, such as thermalization, many-body localization, and emergent phenomena in periodically driven systems.

Any realistic quantum system is inevitably subject to an external environment. This environment makes the open-system dynamics significant for many quantum tech-nologies, such as entangled-state engineering, quantum simulation, and quantum sensing. The information flow of a system to its environment usually induces a Markovian process, while the backflow of information from the environment exhibits non-Markovianity. The practical environment, usually consisting of a large number of degrees of freedom, is hard to control, despite some attempts on controllable transitions from Markovian to non-Markovian dynamics. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the engineering of multiple dissipative channels by controlling the adjacent nuclear spins of a nitrogen-vacancy centre in diamond. With a controllable non-Markovian dynamics of the open system, we observe that the quantum Fisher information flows to and from the environment using different noisy channels. Our work contributes to the developments of both noisy quantum metrology and quantum open systems from the view points of metrologically useful entanglement., 8 pages,6 figures

It is challenging to construct metrology schemes which harness quantum features such as entanglement and coherence to surpass the standard quantum limit. We propose an ansatz for devising adaptive-feedback quantum metrology (AFQM) strategy which reduces greatly the searching space. Combined with the Markovian feedback assumption, the computational complexity for designing AFQM would decrease from $N^7$ to $N^4$ , for N probing systems. The feedback scheme devising via machine learning such as particle-swarm optimization and derivative evolution would thus requires much less time and produces equally well imprecision scaling. We have thus devised an AFQM for 207-partite system. The imprecision scaling would persist steadily for N > 207 when the parameter settings for 207-partite system is employed without further training. Our ansatz indicates an built-in resilience of the feedback strategy against qubit loss. The feedback strategies designed for the noiseless scenarios have been tested against the qubit loss noise and the phase fluctuation noise. Our numerical result confirms great resilience of the feedback strategies against the two kinds of noise., 6 pages, 3 figures, new data of noise resilience added

We study the quench dynamics of entanglement spectra in the Kitaev chain with variable-range pairing quantified by power-law decay rate $\alpha$. Considering the post-quench Hamiltonians with flat bands, we demonstrate that the presence of entanglement-spectrum crossings during its dynamics is able to characterize the topological phase transitions (TPTs) in both short-range ($\alpha$ > 1) or long-range ($\alpha$ < 1) sector. Properties of entanglement-spectrum dynamics are revealed for the quench protocols in the long-range sector or with $\alpha$ as the quench parameter. In particular, when the lowest upper-half entanglement-spectrum value of the initial Hamiltonian is smaller than the final one, the TPTs can also be diagnosed by the difference between the lowest two upper-half entanglement-spectrum values if the halfway winding number is not equal to that of the initial Hamiltonian. Moreover, we discuss the stability of characterizing the TPTs via entanglement-spectrum crossings against energy dispersion in the long-range model., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures

We investigate quantum information masking for arbitrary dimensional quantum states. We show that mutually orthogonal quantum states can always be served for deterministic masking of quantum information. We further construct a probabilistic masking machine for linearly independent states. It is shown that a set of d dimensional states, $\{ |a_1 \rangle_A, |t a_2 \rangle_A, \dots, |a_n \rangle_A \}$, $n \leq d$, can be probabilistically masked by a general unitary-reduction operation if they are linearly independent. The maximal successful probability of probabilistic masking is analyzed and derived for the case of two initial states., Comment: 5 pages, 1 figures