Papers QISS1

Physical systems may couple to other systems through variables that are not gauge invariant. When we split a gauge system into two subsystems, the gauge-invariant variables of the two subsystems have less information than the gauge invariant variables of the original system; the missing information regards degrees of freedom that express relations between the subsystems. All this shows that gauge invariance is a formalization of the relational nature of physical degrees of freedom. The recent developments on boundary variables and boundary charges are clarified by this observation.

In the last few years, there has been increasing interest in quantum processes with indefinite causal order. Process matrices are a convenient framework to study such processes. Ref. [1] defines higher order transformations from process matrices to process matrices and shows that no continuous and reversible transformation can change the causal order of a process matrix. Ref. [2] argues, based on a set of examples, that there are situations where a process can change its causal order over time. Ref. [2] claims that the formalism of higher order transformations is not general enough to capture its examples. Here we show that this claim is incorrect. Moreover, a crucial example of Ref. [2] has already been explicitly considered in Ref. [1] and shown to be compatible with its results.

The notorious Wigner’s friend thought experiment (and modifications thereof) has in recent years received renewed interest especially due to new arguments that force us to question some of the fundamental assumptions of quantum theory. In this paper, we formulate a no-go theorem for the persistent reality of Wigner’s friend’s perception, which allows us to conclude that the perceptions that the friend has of her own measurement outcomes at different times cannot “share the same reality”, if seemingly natural quantum mechanical assumptions are met. More formally, this means that, in a Wigner’s friend scenario, there is no joint probability distribution for the friend’s perceived measurement outcomes at two different times, that depends linearly on the initial state of the measured system and whose marginals reproduce the predictions of unitary quantum theory. This theorem entails that one must either (1) propose a nonlinear modification of the Born rule for two-time predictions, (2) sometimes prohibit the use of present information to predict the future — thereby reducing the predictive power of quantum theory — or (3) deny that unitary quantum mechanics makes valid single-time predictions for all observers. We briefly discuss which of the theorem’s assumptions are more likely to be dropped within various popular interpretations of quantum mechanics.

We provide numerical evidence that the nonlinear searching algorithm introduced by Wong and Meyer cite{meyer2013nonlinear}, rephrased in terms of quantum walks with effective nonlinear phase, can be extended to the finite 2-dimensional grid, keeping the same computational advantage BHg{with} respect to the classical algorithms. For this purpose, we have considered the free lattice Hamiltonian, with linear dispersion relation introduced by Childs and Ge cite{Childs_2014}. The numerical simulations showed that the walker finds the marked vertein $O(N^{1/4} log^{3/4} N) $ steps, with probability $O(1/log N)$, for an overall complexity of $O(N^{1/4}log^{7/4}N)$. We also proved that there exists an optimal choice of the walker parameters to avoid that the time measurement precision affects the complexity searching time of the algorithm.

At the end of Hawking evaporation, the horizon of a black hole enters a physical region where quantum gravity cannot be neglected. The physics of this region has not been much explored. We characterise its physics and introduce a technique to study it.

In this paper I apply newly-proposed information-theoretic principles to thermodynamic work extraction. I show that if it is possible to extract work deterministically from a physical system prepared in any one of a set of states, then those states must be distinguishable from one another. This result is formulated independently of scale and of particular dynamical laws; it also provides a novel connection between thermodynamics and information theory, established via the law of conservation of energy (rather than the second law of thermodynamics). Albeit compatible with these conclusions, existing thermodynamics approaches cannot provide a result of such generality, because they are scale-dependent (relying on ensembles or coarse-graining) or tied to particular dynamical laws. This paper thus provides a broader foundation for thermodynamics, with implications for the theory of von Neumann’s universal constructor

We introduce a new family of coherent states for loop quantum gravity, inspired by the twisted geometry parametrization. We compute their peakedness properties and compare them with the heat-kernel coherent states. They show similar features for the area and the holonomy operators, but improved peakedness in the direction of the flux. At the gauge-invariant level, the new family is built from tensor products of coherent intertwiners. To study the peakedness of the holonomy operator, we introduce a new shift operator based on the harmonic oscillator representation associated with the twisted geometry parametrization. The new shift operator captures the components of the holonomy relevant to disentangle its action into a simple positive shift of the spins.

Probabilistic storage and retrieval (PSR) of unitary quantum dynamics is possible with exponentially small failure probability with respect to the number of systems used as a quantum memory [PRL 122, 170502 (2019)]. Here we study improvements due to a priori knowledge about the unitary transformation to be stored. In particular, we study $N rightarrow 1$ PSR of qubit phase gates, i.e. qubit rotations a round $Z$ axis with an unknown angle, and show that if we access the gate only $N$-times, the optimal probability of perfect retrieving of its single use is $N/(N+1)$. We propose a quantum circuit realization for the optimal protocol and show that programmable phase gate [PRL 88, 047905 (2002)] can be turned into $(2^k-1)rightarrow 1$ optimal PSR of phase gates and requires only $k$ CNOT gates, while having exponentially small failure probability in $k$.

Thermodynamic properties of the four-dimensional cross-polytope model, the 16-cell model, which is an example of higher dimensional generalizations of the octahedron model, are studied on the square lattice. By means of the corner transfer matrirenormalization group (CTMRG) method, presence of the first-order phase transition is confirmed. The latent heat is estimated to be $L_4^{~} = 0.3172$, which is larger than that of the octahedron model $L_3^{~} = 0.0516$. The result suggests that the latent heat increases with the internal dimension $n$ when the higher-dimensional series of the cross-polytope models is considered.

A still widely debated question in the field of relativistic quantum information is whether entanglement and the degree of violation of Bell’s inequalities for massive relativistic particles are frame independent or not. At the core of this question is the effect that spin gets entangled with the momentum degree of freedom at relativistic velocities. Here, we show that Bell’s inequalities for a pair of particles can be maximally violated in a special-relativistic regime, even without any post-selection of the momentum of the particles. To this end, we use the methodology of quantum reference frames, which allows us to transform the problem to the rest frame of a particle, whose state can be in a superposition of relativistic momenta from the viewpoint of the laboratory frame. We show that, when the relative motion of two particles is non-collinear, the optimal measurements for violation of Bell’s inequalities in the laboratory frame involve “coherent Wigner rotations”. Moreover, the degree of violation of Bell’s inequalities is independent of the choice of the quantum reference frame. Our results open up the possibility of extending entanglement-based quantum communication protocols to relativistic regimes.