Quantum Physics Paper Analysis

We study entanglement distillation under operations that remain completely positive under partial-transpose conjugation, a.k.a. PPT channels, in the standard quantum Shannon theory regime of asymptotically vanishing but non-zero error. Our main results are: (a) a regularised formula for the PPT distillable entanglement in terms of a measured-relative-entropy-like quantity; and (b) two different single-letter converses, one based on operator quadratic forms and the other on Hirschman's strengthening of the Hadamard three-line theorem. As an immediate application of (b), we show that the PPT distillable entanglement can be strictly smaller than the regularised Rains bound, thereby resolving an open problem in the theory of entanglement manipulation [Regula et al., NJP 21:103017, 2019]. A gap appears already for $3\times 3$ Werner states: at antisymmetric weight $25/26$, a certified upper bound of $0.62107$ ebits lies below the (regularised) Rains bound, which equals $\frac{25}{26} \log_2 5 - \log_2 3 \approx 0.64766$ ebits. On a different note, (a) implies a faithful lower bound on the PPT distillable entanglement in terms of the entanglement negativity, which provides a quantitative counterpart to the qualitatively known fact that any NPT state is PPT distillable [Eggeling et al., PRL 87:257902, 2001].

Entanglement and non-stabilizerness are complementary resources underlying the complexity of quantum states, yet extracting either quantity from large quantum circuits generally requires exponentially scaling resources. In diagrammatic approaches to quantum computation, such as the ZX-calculus, both quantities likewise typically require expensive tensor contractions that are not native to graphical rewriting. Here we show that both entanglement and magic can be efficiently estimated directly from ZX-diagrams. Flow enables efficient extraction of a normal form separating a potentially extensively entangled graph-state backbone from non-Clifford Pauli gadgets. This structure yields additive upper and lower bounds on bipartite entanglement entropy, which we further tighten through a preprocessing procedure that removes or merges redundant non-Clifford contributions. The same normal form gives an upper bound on logarithmic stabilizer extent. We benchmark these methods in random unitary and monitored circuits, and a circuit combining Trotterized Hamiltonian evolution with Clifford layers, finding that the resulting bounds remain informative even at large qubit numbers, circuit depths, and internal spider counts. Our results provide scalable probes of entanglement and non-stabilizerness of ZX-diagrams and establish a bridge between ZX-calculus and quantum many-body resource characterization, with applications across quantum computing, quantum information, and condensed-matter physics.

Building a quantum model involves a tradeoff: how complex the circuit should be, and how much training data it needs. Caro et al. show that models with fewer trainable gates need less training data to generalize well. Q-FLAIR shows that a quantum feature-map circuit can be grown gate-by-gate, stopping once further growth stops improving the training loss. We ask whether these two results combine into a predictable scaling law. Does Q-FLAIR's own stopping rule pick larger or smaller circuits as training data grows? Does the resulting generalization behavior track Caro et al.'s bound? We reimplement Q-FLAIR's growth mechanism faithfully, including its analytic reconstruction and exact stopping rule. We run it on full-resolution (784-pixel) MNIST 3-vs-5 classification, at five training-set sizes from N = 2000 to 10000. We then fine-tune each resulting circuit, so we can measure Caro et al.'s notion of active gates, K. We find no predictable relationship between training-set size and the circuit size Q-FLAIR converges to. Circuit size and test accuracy both vary non-monotonically with N, and seed-to-seed variance is nearly as large as any trend across N. The empirical generalization gap never exceeds Caro et al.'s bound in 14 of 15 runs, so the bound holds as a valid guarantee in those runs. But the gap correlates only weakly with the bound's value (r = 0.12). This shows that K does not explain most of the variation we observe. Why a valid guarantee can coexist with such weak predictive power remains an open question, and answering it may be necessary before circuit depth and training data size can be jointly optimized in practice.

Optical tweezer arrays trapping ultracold atoms and molecules are a versatile quantum science platform with broad impact in quantum simulation, quantum computation, and quantum metrology. The polarization dependence of anisotropic vector and tensor light shifts offers a degree of freedom for precise quantum state engineering of trapped particles. Similarly, state-selective operations depend on the polarization of the addressing light through the atom--light coupling strength. Yet, methods for controlling the polarization of individual tweezers or local addressing beams remain an experimental challenge. Here, we demonstrate independent, site-resolved linear polarization rotation across an optical tweezer array by exploiting the local birefringence tunability of a spatial light modulator. Applying this capability to an array of $^{88}\rm{Sr}$ atoms, we homogenize differential light shifts imparted by the 813-nm tweezers to the narrow ${^1{\rm S}_0}\leftrightarrow{^3{\rm P}_1}$ transition, enabling sideband cooling under a magic-angle condition. Furthermore, we show dynamic transport of trapped atoms across distinct polarization zones with high survival and preserved coherence. Finally, we characterize tweezer polarization noise and demonstrate closed-loop stabilization referenced to the atomic transition frequency, reaching mrad-level stability. Our work establishes a technique for manipulating polarization-sensitive atomic and molecular transitions in tweezer architectures, with immediate applications to optical tweezer clocks and multi-zone quantum processors.

Early fault-tolerant quantum algorithms are a key step in scalable quantum computing, but are ultimately constrained by residual, uncorrectable logical errors. Logical quantum error mitigation can eliminate this bias, however its standard requirements include prior noise characterization, more complex experiments, and substantial sampling overhead. Although no mitigation technique can simultaneously overcome all three constraints, we demonstrate that the first two---noise learning and need for modified circuits---can be completely bypassed for logical circuits by leveraging only syndrome records. Specifically, we introduce virtual error cancellation: a method that, unlike previous bias-free approaches, operates entirely in classical post-processing on universal quantum circuits. We develop and numerically test end-to-end protocols that reduce the sampling overhead beyond fundamental limitations of existing syndrome-aware mitigation techniques, including syndrome-based postselection. In particular, we propose a scheme that pairs the low-latency decoder used in the experiment with a high-complexity decoder run in post-processing. In numerical simulations of a distance-7 rotated surface code, we show that our full-stack dual-decoder algorithm exhibits an error that diminishes as the number of samples increases, capable of reaching more than three orders of magnitude of suppression compared to the decoded logical error rate in an experimentally achievable setting. These results establish syndrome records as a resource for correcting universal computational estimates after quantum execution.

We determine the two-way quantum and secret-key capacities of the pure-loss channel under an average input photon-number constraint. For transmissivity $η$ and photon budget $N$, both capacities equal $g(N)-g((1-η)N)$, where $g$ is the entropy of a thermal state. This coincides with the rate achieved by the known reverse coherent information of a two-mode squeezed vacuum. Our result provides the last missing capacity formula for the celebrated pure-loss channel, completing the picture of bosonic quantum communication under pure loss.

We study two problems: Local Leakage Resilience (LLR) for Shamir secret sharing, and worst-case Optimal Polynomial Intersection (OPI). Both problems concern polynomials $Q(X)$ of degree less than $k$, over a prime-order finite field $\mathbb{F}_p$. In LLR for Shamir secret sharing, one asks how much one can learn about $Q(0)$ given a few bits leaked from each of $Q(α_1), \ldots, Q(α_n)$, for distinct non-zero evaluation points $α_i \in \mathbb{F}_p$. In OPI, one is given input list $S_1, \ldots, S_n \subset \mathbb{F}_p$, and wants to find a polynomial $Q(X)$ of degree less than $k$ so that $Q(α_i) \in S_i$ for as many $i$ as possible. Leveraging recent connection between these two problems due to (Sun, Wootters 2026), we improve the state-of-the-art for both problems. For LLR, we show that there is some constant $δ> 0$ so that, as long as $R := k/n \geq 1/2 - δ$, Shamir secret-sharing is one-bit locally leakage resilient (meaning that one can learn only a negligible amount about $Q(0)$). This is the first result to break the so-called "one-half barrier" for LLR, and improves over the previous best known result, requiring $R \geq 0.668$ (Kasser, 2025). For OPI, we give a quantum algorithm that finds a polynomial $Q(X)$ that agrees with at least a $\mathsf{SCL}_ρ(R)-\varepsilon$ fraction of the lists in expectation, for every fixed $\varepsilon>0$, where $\mathsf{SCL}_ρ$ is the \emph{semicircle law} of (Jordan et al., 2025). This improves previous algorithmic (and existential) results of (Jo, 2026) and (Horinaga, Yamakawa, 2026). We also give further improved existential results. We also adapt the hardness result of (Yamakawa, Zhandry, 2024) to apply to OPI (rather than a folded version); over large fields, this gives an unconditional separation between the quantum and classical hardness of OPI relative to a membership oracle.

We develop a framework to construct large decoherence-free subspaces with a non-trivial structure. The construction is based on hybrid quantum systems in which quantum matter is coupled to a dissipative bosonic mode. Dissipation imposes a global constraint on the matter by selecting the matter null states in the long-time limit. The decoherence-free subspaces spanned by matter null states can exhibit exotic quantum properties and emergent symmetries that do not characterize the full Liouvillian dynamics. We show how to construct many-body operators with physically interesting null states by employing representation theory of Lie algebras. This approach allows us to choose models based on their underlying algebraic structure. We consider explicitly the example of coupling a lossy optical cavity to the directed tunneling operator of quantum particles in one-dimension. In this case, the symmetries of the decoherence-free subspace originate in an $\mathfrak{sl}(2,\mathbb{C})$ algebra, leading to an exponentially large number of steady states. We characterize the null states for both fermionic and bosonic particles, employing analytical and numerical methods. The states exhibit several properties that underline their complex quantum nature: long-range kinetic correlations and volume-law entanglement. The nonreciprocal nature of the directed tunneling dynamics leads to the emergence in the many-body regime of a symmetry-constrained Liouvillian skin effect. The open light-matter system exhibits a strong symmetry stemming from spinless $η$-pairing algebras. We show how the non-trivial properties of the long-times states emerge in the dissipative dynamics from generic initial states, by performing time-dependent matrix product state simulations. Our framework opens avenues for dissipatively engineering complex quantum correlations and harnessing nonreciprocity in a controlled manner.

Dense-neutrino flavor evolution is a quantum many-body problem whose fully correlated treatment becomes rapidly more expensive with increasing particle number and spatial structure. We develop a \texttt{QCNO} quantum simulation code that maps a inhomogeneous forward-scattering neutrino Hamiltonian with advection and finite-range interactions to TEBD2 product-formula quantum circuits, and connects ideal many-body simulation, backend-aware execution, and fault-tolerant resource estimation within the same physical model. We reproduce the exact many-body evolution of the suppressed mean-field-like transverse fast flavor instability through $N=30$ and show that even a single open-boundary interaction generates Rënyi entanglement and non-stabilizer magic, although noisy backends still produce polarization RMSEs of order $0.1$--$0.3$. The restricted active interaction graph of this problem allows us to estimate the circuit depth and $T$ gate cost through $N=50$ for both NISQ and fault-tolerant approaches. The measured TEBD2 error in our fiducial ideal simulation of order $10^{-3}$ motivates a synthesis tolerance $\varepsilon_{\rm syn}\sim10^{-7}$, corresponding to about $70$ $T$ gates per $R_Z$ rotation. The generated circuit contains $1.4\times10^4$ $T$ gates per qubit for open boundaries (twice that for closed boundaries), requiring an application-level logical-$T$ error target of order $10^{-7}$ for early fault-tolerant architectures.

Full Pauli-basis tomography of an arbitrary $n$-qubit state uses the expectation values of all nonidentity Pauli observables. For multiqubit systems, prior knowledge that the state is pure allows some of these observables to be omitted while retaining uniqueness. We study two resulting notions of uniqueness: whether every pure state is uniquely determined among pure states (UDP), and whether every pure state is uniquely determined among all states, including mixed states (UDA). We derive quartic uniqueness certificates from the fourth elementary symmetric polynomial of operators in the real span of the omitted Pauli observables. An exact quartic identity shows that, for $n$-qubit systems with $n\geq 3$, every pure state is UDA whenever the omitted Pauli observables contain no four distinct operators that commute pairwise and multiply to $\pm I$. For three qubits, this condition is also necessary for UDP, yielding an exact characterization of both UDP and UDA. We further prove that UDP and UDA coincide for any number of qubits whenever the omitted Pauli observables commute pairwise. These results provide directly checkable structural criteria for certifying pure-state tomography from restricted Pauli measurements.

Trapped-ion quantum simulators are powerful platforms for exploring many-body physics, yet engineering of arbitrary interaction graphs remains a central challenge. To leverage the intrinsic structure of native motional modes and thereby enhance programmability, a residual-guided optimization protocol is introduced for the systematic design of multi-tone global drive spectra. While the achievable interaction fidelity is fundamentally bounded by the available motional modes, this adaptive strategy converges on the theoretical limit using a number of laser tones that scales nearly linearly with system size. The versatility of this method enables the synthesis of both long-range and traditionally difficult short-range coupling topologies. Additionally, by incorporating a penalty for residual motional excitation, the algorithm effectively mitigates errors associated with incomplete closure of phase-space trajectories. Overall, this scalable framework significantly expands the programmable capabilities of trapped-ion architectures while maintaining low computational overhead and high potential for experimental implementation.

Witnessing entanglement between electrons propagating in quantum circuits requires accessing their two-electron coherences, which encode the two-particle quantum correlations generated by Coulomb interactions. Yet, experimental reconstruction of two-electron coherence remains a major challenge. We introduce photo-assisted two-electron tomography, a quantum coherence reconstruction protocol from dc-currents and time-averaged current correlations, routinely measured in electron quantum optics experiments. Driving an energy filter with a small rf tone encodes off-diagonal coherences in the frequency domain into the dc-current response, enabling single-electron tomography without resorting to current-noise measurements. Extending it to two channels, current correlations after two photo-assisted filters reconstruct the two-electron Wigner distribution and isolate its irreducible two-body part. When applied to Coulomb-coupled quantum Hall edge channels, the protocol reveals interaction-induced energy entanglement. Signatures of this entanglement are visible through the violation of an entanglement witness based on Cauchy-Schwarz inequalities, as well as Wigner function negativities, which remain resolved above the thermal background for realistic device parameters. A generalized Franson geometry further extends the approach to intra-channel two-electron coherences. This opens a direct pathway to detect and characterize electronic entanglement in ballistic quantum circuits.

Establishing the microscopic origin of localized emission in two-dimensional materials through consistent agreement between experiment and theory remains challenging. Recent STM/STS-STML measurements assigned an emission near 1.8 eV in monolayer MoS$_2$/hBN(2L)/graphene to the negatively charged CH$_\mathrm{S}^{-}$ defect. However, a comprehensive theoretical description of this emitter is still lacking. Here, we develop such a description and systematically investigate the photophysical properties of CH$_\mathrm{S}^{-}$ in monolayer MoS$_2$, two bilayer configurations, and a MoS$_2$/hBN heterostructure. The defect retains a similar local geometry and favors a singlet ground state in all four environments, whereas its electronic transition, zero-phonon line, electron-phonon coupling, radiative lifetime, and transition-dipole orientation depend strongly on the surrounding layers. The isolated-monolayer model exhibits substantial structural reorganization and produces a broad, dominant phonon sideband that is inconsistent with experiment. Adding an adjacent layer, either MoS$_2$ or hBN, substantially suppresses the phonon sideband, with only a minor dependence on the defect position in bilayer MoS$_2$. In particular, the MoS$_2$/hBN model yields a weak phonon sideband and closely reproduces the experimental photoluminescence lineshape. Our results thus provide the first theoretical agreement of CH$_\mathrm{S}^{-}$ emission and further reveal the role of adjacent layers in determining the electronic, vibronic, and optical properties of the quantum emitters in two-dimensional materials.

The entanglement structure of a bipartite pure state is characterized by its entanglement spectrum, or equivalently, by the family of Rényi-$k$ entanglement entropies with integer $k$. Taking the difference of two such entropies defines a quantity known as an entanglement spread, that is monotonous under local operations, and that vanishes if and only if the entanglement spectrum of the state is flat. We introduce a multipartite generalization of this notion which, for a fixed number $D\geq 3$ of parties, results in a collection of maps indexed by pairs of $D$-edge-colored graphs (obeying some condition). Each member of this collection takes the form of a difference of two multipartite Rényi entanglement entropies, each associated to a local unitary polynomial invariant (known in this context as a trace-invariant), and is shown to be monotonous under local operations. We then argue that a previously introduced family of so-called hypergraph-tensor (HT) states can be understood as a multipartite counterpart to the family of flat bipartite states. Indeed, we first prove that, when $D=3$, a tripartite pure state is HT if and only if it minimizes a particular (infinite) family of entanglement spreads. Second, we embed the set of HT states into the much larger family of spectral hypergraph-tensor (SHT) states, defined by a new Ansatz we introduce. We then prove that HT states can be uniquely characterized as the minimizers of some fixed entanglement spread among SHT states, for arbitrary $D\geq 3$. We also investigate SHT states in their own right: in particular, we characterize their orbits under local unitary transformations. Finally, along the way, the asymptotic large-$N$ expectation values of a number of entanglement spreads are computed in the Haar-random state of local dimension $N$.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate an asymmetric key-generation scheme in which public and private keys are derived from a six-qubit photonic entangled state. A six-qubit entangled state is generated from two photons, each carrying one polarization and two path qubits. The state is prepared in an equal superposition of eight of the sixty-four six-qubit basis states, in which each photon's three qubits form a codeword of the classical [3,2,2] even-parity code, and are distributed between the two parties, Alice and Bob. This ensures, each triple is a uniformly random codeword and the two codewords are locked together through the correlation. The parity constraint is a local stabilizer, so each party verifies it on its own data every round, and eliminates the bit flip errors arising from imperfections, detector dark counts and multiple occupancy before it enters the raw key. A single publicly announced bit, chosen at random from either of the path qubits, allows each party to reconstruct the other's full triple while leaking no information to third party. We realize the desired six-qubit state using a Sagnac-based type-II SPDC source, reporting a Bell-CHSH parameter S = 2.798 +/- 0.008, by implementing gate operation on polarization and path degree's of freedom. This approach provides a physics-based alternative to public-key cryptosystems built on computational hardness assumptions. A t-bit string generated from multiple rounds for encryption will be intrinsically random. Without the private key, one needs at least O(2^t) runs on an t-qubit quantum system to find the matching bit to decrypt.

Superconducting quantum circuits underpin large-scale quantum processors and are increasingly interfaced with optical systems, yet they are vulnerable to quasiparticle poisoning from high-energy radiation and optical fields. Gap engineering of Josephson junctions suppresses quasiparticle-induced relaxation, but quasiparticles near the junction can still shift the qubit frequency and cause phase errors. Here, we extend gap engineering beyond the junction using a flux-tunable transmon with a gold-on-niobium ground plane and island and strongly gap-engineered aluminum junctions designed to keep quasiparticles away from the junction leads. Compared with an all-aluminum transmon with nominally identical junctions, we demonstrate that the niobium device withstands more than an order of magnitude higher near-infrared optical power before excess relaxation appears. The Nb transmon shows no resolvable quasiparticle-induced frequency shift over the same power range. At the same time, we observe that dephasing and state-preparation-and-measurement infidelity increase with optical power even while relaxation remains protected. These results suggest that engineering the quasiparticle energy landscape beyond the junction can substantially increase qubit resilience, not only to radiation-induced error bursts, but also to nearby optical fields.

Quantum networking represents the future of secure communication, enabling fundamentally new capabilities through quantum information exchange. However, these networks require secure, high-fidelity quantum communication channels, and they require every participating node to be a genuine quantum device. Currently, there is no reliable method to verify whether clients entering a quantum network truly possess quantum computational capability and are connecting over robust channels. In this work, we introduce a client-validation protocol that functions as a proof-of-quantum-capability handshake. Our protocol secures a quantum network against classical spoofers, noisy quantum computers, and genuine quantum devices connecting with the network over noisy or insecure channels. We validate the efficacy of this protocol through numerical simulations under erasure, dephasing, and depolarizing noise models.

Quantum programming requires concepts and intuition that differ substantially from those used in traditional programming languages. Multiple quantum programming frameworks address these requirements through different abstractions and execution models, creating tradeoffs in programmability, portability, and performance. Because quantum software is less prevalent in the training data available to large language models, autonomous coding agents might be expected to face additional challenges when working with these frameworks. We present a case study in autonomous migration of the QED-C Application-Oriented Benchmarks from Qiskit to CUDA-Q. Opus, GPT, and Gemini models were each tasked with porting thirteen benchmark methods spanning foundational algorithms, amplitude estimation, Monte Carlo methods, variational optimization, linear-system solving, and factoring. In all cases, the models were able to generate satisfactory ports with little direct coding help and there was a drastic reduction in the time required compared to a human engineer. However, in all cases, the agents resorted to shortcuts when implementation challenges surfaced and multiple prompts were required to force appropriate coding directions. Assessment of the generated implementations showed that no single model consistently produced the best port across all benchmarks, indicating that multi-agent ensemble strategies could mitigate challenges associated with quantum software. The effort resulted in publicly available, near-complete CUDA-Q support in the QED-C benchmarks along with model-generated skills designed to improve agent performance when implementing CUDA-Q applications. When tested on an unseen benchmark, these skills reduced the required model turns by up to 85% and token usage by up to 96%. We conclude by distilling lessons from the case study.

Which pure states give uniform outcomes in several mutually unbiased measurements, and when can they form another measurement basis? We distinguish common unbiased states, their orthonormal completion, and further extension. For a displayed phase-deformed Fourier pair in dimension $2m$, a clock symmetry and skew antiunitary complete every prescribed common unbiased state to an explicit orthonormal basis. In dimension six, an amplitude-profile obstruction proves strong unextendibility of a given mutually unbiased triple when its original third-basis rays are invariant under the ternary clock. We give an exact nonproduct example and an application to a companion whose columns are localized at single Fourier frequencies. For every exact Hadamard matrix in a specified closed entrywise neighborhood of a fixed reference matrix, the coordinate and Hadamard bases have exactly 48 common unbiased rays but no third measurement basis, with a quantitative lower bound on the squared Gram defect of every six-column candidate. We also study auxiliary complex equations for common states, retaining algebraic multiplicities. For a flat unitary of order six with all $3\times3$ minors nonzero, the projective ray scheme is finite; each singular two-minor contributes two reduced isolated boundary points, and the affine coordinate algebra is finite-dimensional over $\mathbb{C}$. In every order, a critical-algebra identity preserves multiplicities; in dimension six it gives finiteness for a fixed phase fibre. Specialization over a discrete valuation ring controls complete reciprocal-orthogonal collections. A nonphysical Tao/Potts collection separates algebraic from physical solutions. These results do not determine the global maximum number of mutually unbiased bases or classify all triples.

Quantum machine learning, and quantum neural networks (QNNs) in particular, are advancing fields with growing potential. Although systematic comparisons of QNN configurations have been explored primarily for classification tasks, comparatively little attention has been given to regression problems, particularly financial time series forecasting. This study presents a large-scale systematic comparative evaluation of QNN component configurations for financial time series forecasting, using the GBP/USD spot exchange rate as a case study. A grid search across encoding methods, ansatz designs, qubit counts, layer depths, and cost functions yields 1,368 distinct model configurations, each evaluated in terms of prediction accuracy, computational cost, and convergence behaviour. The results reveal unique insights into how the choice of methods influences performance, such as that gate selection and arrangement are more critical to model success than raw parameter count, and that entanglement is a system-level property of the full circuit rather than solely at the ansatz level. The best-performing QNN configuration achieves an $R^2$ score of 0.985, outperforming a classical BiLSTM baseline. Additionally, the impact of real quantum hardware noise is assessed through execution on the IQM Emerald device, revealing that gate errors and decoherence represent a significant barrier to practical deployment, with gate selection and circuit depth identified as key determinants of hardware noise resilience. Overall, the findings provide practical architectural guidance for QNN design and establish a baseline characterisation of QNN noise sensitivity on near-term quantum devices.

We establish a rigorous functional-analytic framework for the imaginary component $p_I$ of the complex weak momentum $p_Q = p_R + ip_I = \frac{\hbar}{i}\nabla\lnψ$. For every wavefunction in the Sobolev space $H^1(Ω)$, including those with nodal sets, we prove that the expectation value of $p_I$ vanishes identically, as a consequence of the regularity of $ρ= |ψ|^2$ and without appeal to the polar form $ψ= Re^{iS/\hbar}$. We further show that \textnormal{(i)} the Bohm quantum potential arises entirely from $p_I$ and satisfies $\langle V_{\mathrm{qu}}\rangle = \langle p_I^2\rangle/2m$, from which the known Fisher information relation follows as a corollary; \textnormal{(ii)} the group velocity of a Bloch band is the density-weighted average of $p_R/m$, with no contribution from $p_I$; \textnormal{(iii)} the decomposition is gauge-invariant under magnetic minimal coupling, the vector potential acting only on $p_R$; and \textnormal{(iv)} the results extend to curved Riemannian manifolds.

Protecting quantum information from noise is essential for reliable quantum computation and quantum memories. Quantum state purification addresses this challenge by processing multiple noisy copies of an unknown quantum state to produce an output state of higher fidelity. Here we establish nearly tight upper and lower bounds on the non-Clifford resources required to implement the symmetric-projection purification protocol. For $n$ copies of a $d$-dimensional system, we construct a Clifford+T circuit that block-encodes the symmetric projector with operator-norm error at most $ε$ using $\widetilde{O}(n)$ T gates, where the tilde-$O$ notation suppresses polylogarithmic factors in $n$, $d$, and $1/ε$. Conversely, using stabilizer nullity, we prove that any Clifford+T implementation of such a block encoding with error $ε<\frac{1}{2}\sqrt{1-1/n}$ requires at least $2n-2$ T gates, even allowing arbitrary positive normalization and clean stabilizer ancillas. Taken together, these results establish the nearly optimal scaling of non-Clifford cost with the number of copies and uncover the fundamental resource requirements for coherent symmetry projection in quantum state purification.

Developing general-purpose numerical methods for non-Markovian quantum state diffusion has long been a challenge in the simulation of open quantum systems. This paper proposes a deterministic polynomial chaos Galerkin method, which is easy to implement, accurate, and efficient. By combining a low-rank decomposition of bath correlations with Galerkin projection onto a polynomial chaos basis, the method yields a deterministic formulation compatible with standard numerical solvers for partial differential equations. The reduced density matrix is obtained from a single deterministic solve at a cost comparable to that of computing one stochastic hierarchy trajectory. Replacing an ensemble of $N_{\mathrm{traj}}$ trajectories therefore reduces the computational cost by approximately a factor of $N_{\mathrm{traj}}$ and eliminates statistical sampling error. Benchmark comparisons show that the proposed method achieves smaller errors at lower computational cost than the tested stochastic hierarchy methods. Applications involving nonquadratic potentials, diffraction and interference, and coupled three-dimensional dynamics demonstrate its ability to handle challenging problems.

In this work, we theoretically investigate the non-equilibrium evolution of the correlation functions of a quantum scalar field following a mass quantum quench in a finite-size system. The self-consistent equation for the Keldysh (statistical) correlation function is solved numerically in the one-loop approximation. A specific spatio-temporal effect is observed: at a point in time approximately equal to half the system size, the effective mass experiences a strong disturbance. It is shown that this effect is driven by the interference of counter-propagating wave fronts of fluctuations that propagate within the light cone and is induced by periodic boundary conditions.

Quantum fidelity kernels and quantum extreme learning machines share the same basic architecture: a fixed quantum device generates features that are combined through a classically trained linear model. We refer to this broad non-variational setting as quantum linear regression. A defining aspect of these models is that the quantum features are not directly available, but must be estimated from a finite number of shots. We show that finite statistics makes quantum linear regression unavoidably ill-conditioned. Ideal feature vectors are confined to a subspace determined by the dimension of the Hilbert space, whereas finite-shot estimates generically acquire components outside this subspace. Training then attempts to fit directions that disappear in the infinite-statistics limit, making the learned model increasingly sensitive to sampling noise. We analyze this mechanism for quantum extreme learning machines trained on $n_{\rm tr}$ states with $N$ shots per state. Despite the ill-conditioning, predictions remain controlled when the training targets are exact. Finite sampling produces a systematic prediction error that decreases quadratically with $N$, while fluctuations induced by the random training measurements decrease inversely with the total training budget. Thus, unlike in standard linear regression with exactly known features, increasing the dataset size alone cannot remove the error caused by sampling noise. If the training targets are also noisy, due for instance to state-preparation errors, the otherwise hidden directions become active. The test error can then increase with $N$, a behavior that we ascribe to a form of quantum overfitting. Our results expose a fundamental tradeoff between dataset size and per-state statistics in non-variational quantum learning and provide a baseline for resource-aware training and regularization strategies.

The $2\times3$ magic rectangle is a nonlocal game in which two players match entries subject to incompatible parity constraints. We prove that its quantum value is $(1+\sqrt{2/3})/2$ and classify all optimal strategies in arbitrary finite local dimensions, allowing general measurements. Every optimal strategy contains a maximally entangled pair of four-dimensional systems, with fixed measurements on the local state supports up to local isometries and ancillary systems. The attaining construction was previously known from quantum random access codes. An exact sum-of-squares identity gives the upper bound, and its equality relations determine the measurement algebra needed for the classification. The rectangle determines the largest magic-square score compatible with perfect prediction of Alice's first row by an adversary with quantum side information. We classify all finite-dimensional strategies attaining this score with perfect prediction and show that one minus the best compatible guessing probability has linear order in the score excess above it. The same rigidity theorem classifies all optimal three-bit random access codes that hide the full input parity.

Absolutely positive partial transpose (APPT) states, which remain PPT under every global unitary, provide a spectral relaxation of absolutely separable states, which remain separable under every such transformation. Despite substantial progress, whether these two notions coincide beyond qubit-qudit systems remains unresolved, motivating the study of structured state families in which the APPT spectral constraints and separability can be analyzed exactly. We study this problem for Bell-diagonal states in two settings: the standard two-qutrit Weyl-Heisenberg basis and the two-ququart lattice basis generated by two-qubit Pauli operators. In the two-qutrit case, we show that a linearized necessary condition for APPT defines a polytope of spectra in which every associated Weyl-Heisenberg Bell-diagonal state admits an exact decomposition into explicitly separable states. This yields a separability criterion that applies to a region even larger than the APPT set itself. In the two-ququart lattice Bell-diagonal setting, we show that a state remains PPT under every permutation of its Bell coefficients if and only if its six largest Bell coefficients sum to at most 1/2, and we prove that all such states are separable. Equivalently, every entangled lattice Bell-diagonal state becomes NPT after a suitable coefficient permutation and is therefore not APPT. The proofs combine convex-polytope analysis, affine and symplectic orbit reductions, and exact rational decompositions into separable states supported on affine Lagrangian subsets. Our results rule out entangled APPT states in both Bell-diagonal families, and provide simple spectral inequalities as sufficient criteria for separability in both cases. Being basis-specific, however, they do not by themselves settle whether APPT and absolute separability coincide.

We introduce the unitary-accessible coherence-erasure distance, which measures the minimum unitary-control cost required to transform a quantum state into an incoherent state without changing its spectrum. The target states are restricted to incoherent states on the same unitary orbit, leading to a geometry different from conventional state-space proximity. We establish inequalities relating orbit-restricted quantum transport, Bures geometry, and the unitary-control distance. These quantities coincide for pure states but can differ for mixed states. For qubits, we derive an exact expression and show that, in the nondegenerate case, the coherence-erasure cost depends on the eigenbasis orientation rather than on the eigenvalues. For nondegenerate qutrits, we reduce the problem to an optimization over the monomial unitary group. We derive the tight universal bound $\arccos[(2\sqrt2-1)/4]$ and construct an explicit eigenbasis that attains it. The resulting distance also determines the minimum coherence-erasure time under bounded unitary driving, giving it a direct operational meaning.

Structural measures such as the clustering coefficient and the average shortest-path length characterise how a network is organised. These measures are typically formulated for real, non-negative edge weights. A class of quantum and photonic architectures has complex edge weights instead, whose phases determine whether alternative routes interfere constructively or destructively. These architectures are also bipartite, so triangles are absent and the smallest closed cycle is a four-node square. Existing measures address complex weights and bipartite structure separately: bipartite clustering coefficients quantify clustering through four-node squares but do not contain phase information, while interferometric coefficients retain phase but are defined on triangles. In this work, we define a clustering coefficient for complex-weighted bipartite networks which reduces to the classical bipartite coefficient when the phases vanish, becomes negative when alternative routes cancel, and can be obtained for all nodes from a single sparse matrix product. We show that the phase accumulated around a square is the smallest gauge-invariant carrier of structural phase information in a bipartite network. The clustering coefficient factorises into a topological contribution and a phase contribution, making a bipartite Watts--Strogatz ensemble analytically tractable. For phases uniformly distributed on $[-Δ,Δ]$, the mean phase contribution is $(\sinΔ/Δ)^4$, independent of node, degree, and topology. We also derive closed-form expressions for the clustering coefficient, open-path visibility, and phase variance. We numerically verify these predictions and further show that phase disorder increases coherent distance.

We investigate a cavity--atom system beyond the rotating-wave approximation and recast its dynamics as an effective tight-binding problem in the excitation-number basis. The same experimentally relevant light--matter platform exhibits two distinct regimes controlled by the photon number. In the large-photon-number regime, the hopping amplitudes become nearly uniform and the effective lattice reduces to a dimerized SSH-type chain subject to a linear energy gradient. The spectrum then organizes into one or two Wannier--Stark ladders, giving rise to controllable Bloch and Bloch--Zener oscillations and quantitatively explaining the observed revival patterns. In the small-photon-number regime, the intrinsic $\sqrt{\bar n+(\cdots)}$ dependence produces a pronounced hopping deformation, namely dimerized couplings that increase along the excitation-number lattice. This deformation reshapes the density of states, enhances collective localization, and generates an energy-resolved spatial bias of the eigenstates. The corresponding real-time dynamics displays direction-dependent anomalous diffusion together with Bloch-like revivals and beat phenomena in selected parameter windows. Our results show that the same cavity--atom platform can realize both emergent ladder spectra and hopping-induced localization in excitation-number space.

We investigate the redistribution and directional properties of Gaussian tripartite quantum steering in de-Sitter space within the continuous-variable framework. By expressing the Bunch-Davies vacuum in terms of the open-chart modes through a Bogoliubov transformation, we derive the covariance matrix of the resulting multipartite Gaussian state and analyze both one-to-two and two-to-one steering configurations. We find that de-Sitter curvature generally suppresses the steering initially shared among the accessible modes, but its influence depends strongly on the steering direction. In particular, while some steering configurations undergo sudden death at finite curvature, two-to-one steering toward a nongravitational mode remains finite throughout the parameter range considered, demonstrating a robustness of tripartite steering absent in its bipartite counterpart. Remarkably, the maximum steering asymmetry occurs at the critical point at which steering in one direction undergoes sudden death, marking the transition from two-way to one-way steering. We further show that the de-Sitter gravitational field can generate tripartite steering involving modes separated by the cosmological horizon. Depending on the steering partition, this curvature-induced steering exhibits persistent one-way or asymmetric two-way behavior, as well as a sudden-birth transition from one-way to two-way steering. These results demonstrate that de-Sitter curvature not only degrades preexisting quantum correlations but also redistributes and generates directional multipartite steering across causally disconnected regions.

While the Bloch sphere provides a canonical geometric representation for qubits, its generalization to pure qudit states ($d>2$) is not unique. This representation can be extended following two different approaches: increasing the number of points, as in the Majorana representation, or using a single point but in a space of larger dimension, as in the generalized Bloch representation. In this work, we compare these representations of pure qudit states by finding explicit analytical relations between them. In particular, a general formula of the Bloch vector in terms of the Majorana points of a given state is provided. We also analyze some suitable extensions of these representations in the case of pure permutation-symmetric two- and three-qubit states, deriving the corresponding relation between them. These analytical results allow us to study, from a geometric point of view, quantum correlations of special classes of two-qubit states.

In quantum mechanics, among the proposals for how to compute the probability distribution of detection time and place along a given spatial surface or in a given volume, two leading candidates involve absorbing boundary conditions (ABCs) and complex absorbing potentials (CAPs) for the Schrödinger equation. Here, we extend earlier results on how the two are related. It was previously shown that ABCs arise as a limiting case of CAPs, but for that a (reflecting) Neumann boundary condition was assumed at the end of the region with the CAP. Here, we obtain ABCs in a different limit using a Dirichlet boundary condition at the end of the CAP region, which seems more practically relevant and realizable.

Achieving and quantifying ultrastrong magnon-magnon coupling (USC) remains a key challenge for quantum magnonics. Here, we demonstrate widely tunable USC between chiral (right- and left-handed) and acoustic or optical magnon modes in the van der Waals antiferromagnet $CrPS_4$. Using a full quantum model, we decompose the interaction into three microscopic interaction channels: the co-rotating term $g_1$ (mode hybridization), the counter-rotating term $g_2$ (two-mode squeezing), and, uniquely in the chiral regime, the self-squared term $g_3$ that mediates single-mode squeezing. The normalized coupling ratio reaches $g/f_g$ $\sim$ 0.41, entering the USC regime. Most significantly, we establish a complete protocol linking these USC parameters to a measurable quantum phenomenon: a squeezed magnon vacuum state. Our simulations not only visualize the chirality and polarization evolution of the hybrid modes but also demonstrate how to directly extract quadrature fluctuations and a substantial squeezing factor (up to $\sim$ 9.7 dB) from thermal noise-driven magnetization dynamics. This work provides a material-specific quantum framework for USC and a practical pathway to detect and exploit non-classical magnon states in low-damping two-dimensional magnets, opening a route toward quantum-enhanced spintronics and hybrid quantum information platforms.

Near-term quantum approaches to combinatorial optimization are limited by qubit counts, circuit fidelity, sampling cost, and the difficulty of encoding constraints, while machine learning is increasingly used to configure and control quantum optimization workflows. We call such workflows adaptive: decisions conventionally fixed in advance, from formulation and penalties to shot budgets, backends, and whether to invoke a quantum processor at all, are made by learned policies that respond to the instance, the progress of the solve, or the hardware. This review examines three paradigms, AI for quantum optimization, quantum for AI-driven optimization, and AI-quantum co-optimization, and organizes the literature by the decision being learned rather than by application. A structured review of 119 papers, 67 coded in detail, shows that the evidence is considerably stronger for AI-assisted quantum optimization than for the reverse direction: learning already reduces quantum evaluations, improves initialization, supports decomposition and penalty control, and mitigates noise, whereas evidence that quantum computation improves learned optimizers remains largely confined to small-scale simulation. Experimental controls are thin: 25 of 57 studies include no classical baseline, the quantum contribution is fully isolated in 10 of 24 studies where an ablation applies, and the median experiment uses 17 qubits. We introduce an M0-M5 evidence hierarchy, from simulation to matched-resource practical advantage, and find no broadly convincing result at the highest level. We argue that scaling is increasingly a systems problem: the question is not only whether a problem fits on a quantum processor, but how classical and quantum resources should be allocated across the optimization process. The review is aimed at researchers in quantum computing, machine learning, and operations research.

The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a variational quantum algorithm used for solving combinatorial optimization problems, which is thought to be a promising application of near-term quantum hardware. However, high rates of noise in these devices can obscure meaningful results. Therefore, it is crucial to understand and suppress the effects of noise on the algorithm's output. Here, we find that the stability of the algorithm in the presence of noise is dependent on its variational parameters. Using a Pauli noise model, we derive an upper bound on the total variation distance between the noisy and noiseless circuit output as a function of these parameters. Results from noisy simulations support this bound and give insight into the best methods to use for parameter generation in the presence of noise. We also introduce new methods of optimization using error penalties and truncated search based on this bound to manufacture error resilience. We extend this analysis to the quantum adiabatic algorithm (QAA) by taking the continuous limit of the QAOA.

We present a non-perturbative framework for the quantum treatment of vibrational excitation in molecular systems driven by electric fields with arbitrary time dependence. For harmonic potentials with linear dipole coupling, the field-induced dynamics is exactly described by a displaced coherent state, whose evolution is completely determined by a complex phase-space coordinate. Closed-form expressions for this coordinate reveal a clear distinction between resonant and non-resonant regimes. The resulting vibrational populations follow a Poisson distribution determined by a dimensionless time-dependent phase-space displacement, for both resonant and non-resonant driving. Resonant driving results in an enhanced phase-space displacement, whereas finite detuning between the driving and vibrational frequencies leads to an exponential suppression of the phase-space displacement and vibrational excitation. While the approach reduces to the standard time-dependent perturbation theory in the weak-field limit, it remains valid in the strong-field regime, where perturbative treatments fail. Our results provide a transparent phase-space picture of vibrational control and enable non-perturbative state preparation in ultrafast spectroscopy.

Large quantum computations require high-fidelity error-corrected memory and fault-tolerant logical operations. To achieve these with superconducting circuits, quantum processors will need many components operating with low error rates. In practice, fabrication of monolithic superconducting devices produces unavoidable heterogeneity in component performance, which the quantum computer must accommodate. We implement strategies to operate a large dynamic compass code on an array of 156 superconducting qubits arranged on a heavy-hexagonal lattice, making use of the entire monolithic quantum processor and redesigning our measurement schedule to exclude underperforming components. We demonstrate improvements of up to $35\%$ in logical error probabilities for a memory experiment by using a noise-informed decoder combined with strategies to exclude the worst-performing qubits and couplers, along with post-selecting on shots with a low probability of leakage errors. In addition to these memory results, we also observe performance gains of up to $56\%$ when these strategies are applied to measurement-based logic, demonstrated by stability experiments. We furthermore demonstrate high-fidelity fault-tolerant logic through lattice surgery. Through pre-selection filtering techniques, we can obtain Bell fidelities above $77\%$, and further logical gap post-selection using exclusive decoding increases these fidelities to above $97\%$. Our experiments demonstrate that high performance can be maintained in key elements of fault-tolerant quantum memory and logic when working on monolithic superconducting quantum processors with underperforming components, by using a suite of noise-informed quantum error correction strategies.

Quantum optical sensing has evolved from isolated solid state spin defect platforms to increasingly bio-integrated systems designed for biomedical applications. This review presents a perspective on this transition, spanning nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond to emerging fluorescent protein based spin qubits. Advances in diamond fabrication have enabled photonic cavities, nanomechanical resonators, and microstructured devices that enhance spin photon interactions and room temperature sensitivity. Exploration of spin defects in alternative materials further expands the sensing landscape. Parallel progress toward biological compatibility includes chip based architectures for in vitro and in vivo studies, microfluidic integration, and minimally invasive nanodiamond probes capable of intracellular nanothermometry and nanorheometry. Improvements in surface functionalization have enhanced coherence and sensing reliability in complex environments. Collectively, these advances highlight the progress and remaining challenges toward application oriented quantum sensing for the life sciences.

We study dielectric properties of holographic insulators from the quantum geometry of the ground state. We realize the insulating state by the pseudoscalar interaction of holographic fermions and calculate the fermionic Green function to extract the effective hamiltonian. We then derive the quantum metric and Berry curvature to compute the transports and finally get the dielectric constant from the imaginary part of conductivity.

We investigate spin-outcome correlations and memory-assisted entropic uncertainty in tree-level Bhabha scattering, where an incident electron $A$ scatters with a positron $B$ initially entangled with a spectator electron $C$. For the fixed-angle post-selected final state, we compare the total memory-assisted uncertainty $U_A$ for three alternative Pauli measurements on $A$ with the entanglement entropy $S(ρ_A)$ across the $A|BC$ partition. We resolve $U_A$ into the separate uncertainties $U_B$ and $U_C$ and evaluate the corresponding outcome-memory mutual-information sums $G_B$ and $G_C$. This separates changes in the randomness of the outcomes on $A$ from changes in their correlations with each memory. In the parameter regions studied, enhanced $A|BC$ entanglement is accompanied by lower $U_A$, most prominently near high-energy backscattering. An analytic treatment of this limit shows that $B$ factorizes from $AC$: $G_B$ vanishes, whereas $G_C$ increases with the initial $B$-$C$ entanglement. An entropic complete complementarity analysis characterizes the accompanying loss of local helicity predictability in $ρ_A$ and changes in the coherence, predictability, and mixedness of the interacting pair $ρ_{AB}$. These results show that initial $B$-$C$ entanglement can lower the total memory-assisted uncertainty in high-energy backscattering by strengthening spin-outcome correlations with the spectator $C$, thereby identifying the distinct roles of the interacting particle and the spectator as quantum memories.

We propose a scheme for generating and controlling remote nonreciprocal magnon--magnon entanglement in a cavity magnonic system with coherent feedback.The two microwave cavities are driven by independent single-mode squeezed vacuum fields, with a rotating YIG sphere in the left cavity and a stationary one in the right cavity. For a fixed rotation direction, reversing the bias magnetic field applied to the rotating sphere changes the sign of the Barnett shift, leading to nonreciprocal magnon--magnon entanglement. By tuning the cavity detuning and feedback phase, entanglement can be generated for one direction of the bias magnetic field while it vanishes for the opposite direction, yielding complete nonreciprocity. Coherent feedback enhances the entanglement at an appropriate reflectivity, whereas stronger feedback can reduce it. The relative squeezing phase provides additional control, and an appropriate choice of unequal squeezing factors improves the entanglement at fixed total input photon occupation. With the squeezed inputs kept fixed, moderate feedback also increases the critical temperature for magnon entanglement.Our results provide a controllable approach to preparing remote nonreciprocal quantum correlations in cavity magnonic systems.

Randomized benchmarking (RB) with structured circuits is experimentally scalable, but gives biased short-depth fidelity estimates because incomplete ensemble mixing introduces transient modes. Waiting for these transients to decay in deeper circuits can push the signal below the noise floor. This is a well-established obstacle, e.g. in linear cross-entropy benchmarking (LinXEB). Here we overcome this obstacle solely through classical post-processing. We introduce a one-parameter family of estimators that interpolate between the standard LinXEB-type post-processing and a new post-processing technique we call the trace filter function. Under practical assumptions, the trace filter function provably suppresses transient modes, exposing an interpretable fidelity decay at short depth, with theoretical guarantees comparable to standard RB, at the cost of an increased variance. We bound the variance, analyze the evaluation complexity of the new estimators, and develop practical post-processing algorithms. Experiments on a Rigetti superconducting processor validate the method for one-dimensional circuits of up to 12 qubits: where the standard estimator requires depth beyond a 40-layer experimental window, the trace filter function yields consistent estimates below 10 layers. Trace-filtered randomized benchmarking therefore extends reliable fidelity characterization to relevant structured circuit ensembles and short-depth regimes that are inaccessible to conventional estimators.

Flow models generate trajectories from an initial distribution to a target distribution by solving an ordinary differential equation defined by a velocity field. Flow matching learns this velocity field by modeling the transport dynamics between the two distributions. Wavefunction flow establishes a formal connection between flow models and quantum dynamics by introducing a continuity Hamiltonian, which drives the Schrödinger evolution of quantum states. In this paper, we investigate accurate and efficient quantum simulation of the wavefunction flow, thereby realizing the efficient implementation of flow models on quantum computers. We first leverage a quantum read-only memory (QROM)-based phase kickback framework for the wavefunction flow simulation, generating probability densities that closely match those produced by the corresponding conventional flow model. To address the high circuit-resource cost, we further incorporate a trained quantum neural network (QNN) into the phase kickback framework, replacing QROM for data encoding. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our proposed method implements flow models on quantum computers more efficiently, since it maintains the accuracy of wavefunction flow simulation compared with the QROM-based framework, and significantly reduces the circuit resources.

A singular sextic oscillator in the finite-Hermite biconfluent-Heun hierarchy generates an exact four-member power-Liouville Hermite orbit. Power coordinate transformations with the Liouville amplitude map the hierarchy member $N=4$ to four half-line Schrödinger spectral charts while preserving the physical regular-recessive Wronskian zero set under energy-coupling reparametrization. Two charts are the previously studied $x^{2/3}$ and inverse-square-root conditionally integrable potentials; the orbit embeds this known power-dual pair together with the singular sextic and linear-plus-quadratic charts. On the selected physical slice, the degree-five accessory compatibility obstruction vanishes identically, while the transformed Frobenius index reproduces both published fractional-power centrifugal coefficients. The common endpoint condition yields an exact discrete sequence of quartic Sturmian eigencouplings for the sextic oscillator. Independent two-sided shooting confirms representative eigencouplings and node counts. A matched large-action analysis further derives the first matched-endpoint correction within the leading Langer action and improves the Maslov-shifted effective-level approximation. The construction thus connects exact Hermite solvability, energy quantization, coupling quantization, and power duality within a single spectral orbit.

Large-scale Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) networks rely on trusted repeaters, making the security properties of the selected communication path an essential part of end-to-end assurance. At the same time, network operators may be unwilling to disclose their internal topology. We present a topology-certification mechanism that lets a provider prove in zero knowledge that policy-compliant routes between two endpoints exist, without disclosing the routes in an individual presentation. Our main idea is to certify nodes and edges independently using multi-message signatures, rather than signing the complete graph as one object. For a route chosen in advance, proof size and cryptographic proving and verification work depend on its positions and attributes, independently of the overall network size, whereas route discovery and certification have separate graph-dependent costs. The construction hides the actual route length up to a public bound and sketches extensions to node-disjoint routes and monotonic additions within a graph epoch. We give a formal security model and conditional proofs of unforgeability and graph hiding for a generic construction. For a BBS-based construction, presentation-size estimates remain below $300$\,KiB at $\ell=m=n=50$, and measured generation and verification times remain below $400$\,ms at $\ell=64$ and $m=n=8$.

Superradiant phase transitions are fundamental phenomena in light-matter coupled systems. Here, we uncover a novel class of superradiant criticality that is topologically distinct from previously known superradiant transitions. Using cavity-mediated cluster-Ising chains as an illustrative example, we numerically demonstrate that the critical line separating the superradiant phase from the cavity topological phase hosts robust symmetry-protected edge degeneracies, a feature absent in conventional superradiant transitions. Remarkably, although its local bulk critical properties are indistinguishable from those of the previously identified topologically trivial superradiant transition, the two criticalities cannot be smoothly connected without breaking the protecting symmetries or passing through a multicritical point. We further show that such topological superradiant criticality is generic, also occurring in cavity-mediated $\mathbb{Z}_{n}^{}$ cluster-qudit chains, as supported by complementary lattice simulations.

As superconducting quantum processors scale toward hundreds of qubits, manual calibration becomes increasingly costly and difficult to sustain. Here we address two system-level factors governing automated calibration, namely, crosstalk induced by parallel operations and temporal drift of control parameters. On a 66-qubit superconducting processor, cross-entropy benchmarking shows that single-qubit calibration tolerates full-chip concurrency with minimal fidelity loss, whereas CZ calibration requires a minimum coupler-graph distance of four to avoid elevated control errors. Continuous monitoring of representative qubit and coupler parameters further yields quantitative refresh rules that assign refresh priority by error-budget consumption. These results turn two conventionally heuristic choices, the concurrency density of calibration tasks and the refresh priority of each control parameter, into measurable operating rules. Implemented within an automated calibration framework, the rules support a six-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state with a zero-noise-extrapolated fidelity of 89.64%, distance-dependent logical-error suppression in a single-cycle repetition-code benchmark, and a reduction of the mean single-qubit error from 0.023 to 0.011 on a 337-qubit processor, providing an experimentally grounded reference for the automated calibration and maintenance of current and future large-scale superconducting quantum systems.

We develop an iterative Bayesian variational quantum eigensolver in which the unknown ground state, parametrised as a real unit vector, is inferred through a von Mises--Fisher distribution sequentially updated from Hadamard-test measurements on a single ancilla qubit. Building on a companion paper that treated a single success outcome via exact moment matching, we generalise the scheme to condition on $m$ success outcomes for the likelihood function per iteration. Since exact moment matching becomes impractical for $m>1$, we exploit the large-concentration regime, in which a first-order expansion of the log-likelihood yields a closed-form von Mises--Fisher posterior with $m$ entering only through a multiplicative weight. We prove that the two convergence properties of the single-outcome scheme---non-decreasing overlap and non-decreasing concentration---are preserved provided $m$ lies within an explicitly characterised range. Based on the theory, we propose a measurement-based algorithm and illustrate the convergence on randomly generated three- and four-qubit Hamiltonian matrices, on $\mathrm{HeH}^+$, and on $\mathrm{H}_2$.

Quantum technologies witness rapid contemporary developments transitioning from abstract scientific ideas and fundamental demonstrations, into systems of sufficient quality and scale, enabling real applications. Photonic quantum technologies are playing a pivotal role in these developments, since photons are robust, easily controlled, detect and measured, thus qualify as flying carriers of quantum information and entanglement distributers. The efforts to develop photonic quantum technologies benefit from the maturity of the classical optical technologies. It was shown that even a source of heralded three entangled photons is sufficient for building large scale quantum computers using otherwise classical optical elements. Here, we demonstrate a novel semiconductor quantum dot based device, which deterministically generate at GHz rates, indistinguishable single photons in a robust Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state of more than a dozen photons. The device utilizes novel natural spin echo concept, provided by the opposite precession directions of the negative and positive carriers' spins in the excited and ground levels of the periodically excited dot, respectively. The excitation rate is finely tuned to nullify the phase acquired by both spins' precession. Our record long GHZ state producing device can yet be feasibly improved to provide higher-rate, brighter and more robust deterministic GHZ source, significantly reducing the overhead requirements for photonic quantum technologies.

Quantum error-correcting circuits are affected by multiple physical noise mechanisms, whose contributions to logical failure must be understood to evaluate code performance and guide improvements in hardware. The individual error budget contributions for an error type $i$ can be characterized by its logical sensitivity $ν_i = \frac{\partial p_L}{\partial p_i}$, which measures the response of the logical error rate $p_L$ to each physical noise parameter $p_i$. Normally, $ν_i$ is measured using linear fits such as finite differences, where $p_L$ is measured at two or more values of $p_i$ to calculate partial derivatives. In this paper, we develop a differentiable estimator to obtain all components of $\nabla_{\mathbf p}p_L$ simultaneously from a single Monte Carlo data set at one noise configuration, using information about the underlying fault configurations. In surface code simulations with circuit-level noise, the estimator agrees with conventional finite differences while requiring one to two orders of magnitude fewer shots to achieve the same variance. We apply this technique to quantify error budgets, resolve sensitivities at the individual qubit level, and infer effective code distance. Finally, we incorporate the sensitivities into Newton root finding to locate and trace threshold contours in multidimensional noise models. These results provide an efficient method for extracting and applying logical sensitivity information from standard quantum error correction simulations.

We show that the radial differential equation for a scalar field in an anti-de Sitter black brane background can be encoded in an exactly solvable semi-infinite spin chain independent of dimensionality. The radial coordinate emerges as lattice quasimomentum. Spin coherence encodes the geometry, while the spectrum and response recover gravitational observables and yield exact screening-mass sum rules. We implement the finite chain on a superconducting processor. At finite filling and low energies, the model yields a conformal field theory in a coordinate proportional to proper radial distance.

Estimates of the quantum resources needed to run fault-tolerant algorithms are almost always reported as single numbers, even though they rest on uncertain hardware parameters and on cost models that disagree. We present an open, tool-agnostic framework that propagates evidence-based priors over fault-tolerant hardware parameters through five surface-code cost models, adds correlated-input sensitivity analysis, and evaluates the resulting intervals with a pre-registered three-layer protocol. Applied to RSA-2048, ECC-256, AES-256, and a Hubbard-model simulation on a superconducting surface-code architecture, it produces three coupled findings that together undermine the single-number convention. Propagating the error rates hardware has actually demonstrated, whose median across five large-array devices is about 4 x 10^-3 rather than the conventional 10^-3, widens the 90% physical-qubit interval to roughly forty times and lifts its median about 4.6 times above the conventional point estimate. Against the same inputs, five independently structured cost models, including two third-party estimators (the Azure Quantum Resource Estimator and Qualtran) that agree with each other to within about ten percent, disagree by a stable factor of two, a structural uncertainty that no single tool reveals. Most consequentially, both third-party estimators exceed their representable envelope for 80 to 100 percent of the evidence-based parameter space, and the AES-256 gate count overflows one tool's counter outright, so these workloads cannot be represented at measured error rates at all. The optimistic convention conceals every one of these effects. The uncertainty machinery we use is standard. The contribution is its evidence-based application, the pre-registered evaluation, and the finding that standard tools break down precisely where hardware operates.

The apparent absence of a stabilizer-speci?c phase-space description for qubit systems is not fundamental, but arises from ?xing a state-independent discrete Wigner map. Allowing the phase-space representation to adapt to the state through a simple optimization procedure, we prove that every qubit stabilizer state admits an exact delta-function discrete Wigner representation for any ?xed phase-space partition. This optimization can be implemented directly at the level of measurement statistics by selecting maximal probabilities across mutually unbiased bases forming the partition. This construction naturally leads to a non-stabilizer witness de?ned by the optimized value of the Wigner function at the origin. Stabilizer states saturate the universal lower bound of this witness for pure states, whereas a value strictly larger than the bound certi?es non-stabilizerness. Although the witness is not a ?nite-size resource monotone, it becomes sharply concentrated and e?ectively invariant under random Cli?ord transformations in the large-qubit limit, suggesting an asymptotically linear growth law for broad families of non-stabilizer states. Our results restore a meaningful geometric phase-space characterization of qubit stabilizer structure and provide an operational diagnostic of non-stabilizerness.

Dynamical protection via strong driving can enable resilient quantum processing on imperfect physical hardware. However, the practical utility of such schemes is frequently limited by parasitic processes such as drive-induced dephasing and leakage. Here, we demonstrate that sub-GHz charge driving of superconducting Kerr oscillators (KOs) in the transmon regime circumvents this trade-off, simultaneously activating fast parametric interactions and protecting the encoded qubit from low-frequency noise. The key is the frequency dependence of the charge sensitivity: using the AC Stark shift as a probe, we find that the KO frequency sensitivity to a charge drive grows quadratically with both drive frequency and amplitude, making the oscillator weakly sensitive to $1/f$ charge noise yet strongly coupled to drives near 1~GHz. Exploiting this, we first demonstrate cooling and reset of the KO in 82~ns, to a residual population below $0.7\%$---lower than its $2.5\%$ steady-state thermal population. Next, using two KOs, we demonstrate logical control and dynamical protection of a dual-rail qubit with nearly fourfold erasure bias. Finally, using a single end-of-circuit erasure check, we achieve an error per Clifford of $5.6\times10^{-4}$, which falls to $1.5\times10^{-4}$ after post-selection, with 25~ns gates.

A pulse-level quantum control program is written against a device whose limits are recorded, if at all, in vendor documentation and source code. A program that exceeds them can be refused at compile time. It can also be accepted and silently altered, or compile and then fail at the board. In the last two cases the experiment runs, and the data does not correspond to the program that was written. We present qconform, a checker that decides whether a pulse program is realizable on a device, given a versioned capability descriptor for that device. Every constraint in a descriptor cites the toolchain observation that established it. The checker is design-time, offline, and deterministic, and it uses no floating point. It reports a verdict, the rules it applied, and a coverage manifest that names what it did not check. We evaluate qconform by differential testing against the QICK and Qblox toolchains, on three QICK board configurations and one Qblox cluster. Over 1263 program runs of 969 distinct programs, the checker accepted no program that a toolchain refuses. On both vendors, a descriptor pinned to one toolchain release accepts programs that older releases refuse. The evaluation also found ten defects in the checker and its descriptors, all fixed.

Near-optimal binary coherent state discrimination can be achieved by performing a displacement operation followed by photon detection. This displacement serves as a control parameter that can be tuned to optimize a chosen figure of merit, which makes such receivers attractive beyond state discrimination. Here, we turn this discrimination strategy into a complete continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) protocol based on a binary alphabet of noisy coherent states (displaced thermal states) and displacement receivers. We develop a strategy for estimating the channel parameters with the same displacement receiver, since standard quadrature-based methods do not apply. While a key map can be obtained with on/off detection, we demonstrate that reliable parameter estimation requires photon-number-resolving detection with sufficient resolution. Finite detector resolution underestimates the observed noise and constitutes a potential security loophole, which we quantify and show to be mitigable with modest resolution. We analyze the protocol's security against entangling-cloner collective attacks in the asymptotic regime, for both direct and reverse reconciliation, and show that it can generate secret keys even under noisy state preparation and imperfect detection. Interestingly, we find that the displacement that minimizes the discrimination error probability also performs well for key generation, thus providing a useful and analytically tractable tuning strategy for the CV-QKD receiver. We evaluate the protocol's performance over a range of transmittances and noise parameters, showing that the displacement receiver can outperform conventional homodyne detection in experimentally relevant regimes. Together, our results point to displacement receivers as a promising alternative for CV-QKD implementations.

A major application of analog quantum hardware is quantum simulation, where a system evolves over time according to a given Hamiltonian. One challenge when implementing the Hamiltonian on a programmable quantum simulator is the availability of distinct coupling types, many of which go beyond the conventional ZZ-couplings found in Ising Hamiltonians that are naturally implemented by various platforms. In prior work, we have developed a method based on domain wall encoding to simulate one-dimensional spin chains using only Ising Hamiltonians, which would otherwise require XX+YY-couplings as well. Here, we implement the method on a commercially accessible Rydberg atom quantum device, and simulate the time evolution of the Heisenberg XXZ model with various anisotropies. We successfully probe the XY and Ising phases of the model and reproduce the qualitative behavior of several one- and two-body observables in both phases, as well as at the critical point. Our work augments the toolbox to simulate canonical quantum many-body systems on analog quantum simulators.

Differentiable quantum architecture search (DQAS) is a promising framework for the automated design of quantum circuits, particularly for variational quantum optimization algorithms. However, its practical deployment on quantum hardware is limited by the large number of circuit measurements required during optimization, making hardware execution costly. In this work, we show that for a broad class of combinatorial optimization problems and commonly used rotational gate parameterizations, the measurement cost of DQAS can be significantly reduced without changing the optimization objective. We derive the proposed measurement reduction scheme theoretically and validate it experimentally on 3-SAT and MaxCut benchmark problems. Our approach reduces the requested gradient measurement cost by about 39 to 41% while introducing only negligible classical post-processing overhead, lowering the practical cost of executing DQAS on quantum hardware.

Repeated measurements can dominate the resources required for quantum energy estimation, making the choice of which Pauli observables to measure together a central optimization problem for variational quantum algorithms. We formulate fully commuting measurement grouping as a classical binary optimization problem based on clique selection and construct non-overlapping groups using mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). For a benchmark of molecular Hamiltonians, groupings optimized with approximate covariances reduce the non-overlapping measurement requirement $\varepsilon^2M$ by $51.8\%$ on average relative to sorted insertion (SI). Using the MILP groups to initialize iterative coefficient splitting (ICS), denoted MILP-ICS, yields an average $24.3\%$ reduction relative to ICS initialized from SI (SI-ICS). The optimized groups also transfer across nearby molecular geometries while preserving substantial measurement savings. We further introduce O-clique, which directly optimizes overlapping commuting supports through candidate-clique selection and coefficient profiles. Although O-clique provides only modest additional reductions beyond MILP-ICS, it reduces the measurement requirement by $27.3\%$ on average relative to SI-ICS with 100 iterations, despite using only five final coefficient refinement iterations, indicating improved support quality. Finally, we extend the comparison to Fermi--Hubbard, Kitaev--Heisenberg--$Γ$, and XYZ lattice Hamiltonians, where MILP-based groupings substantially outperform the corresponding SI-based strategies. Together, these results show that variance-informed optimization of measurement-group structure can substantially reduce sampling costs across molecular and lattice Hamiltonians, with optimized non-overlapping groups providing strong, transferable initializations and direct overlapping optimization offering further gains.

Machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs) excel at in-distribution tasks, accelerating drug and material development, yet they struggle to generalize out-of-distribution. We propose to push the cost-accuracy Pareto frontier by designing observable-agnostic electronic ground-state descriptor models (GSMs) with computational costs situated between MLIPs and Kohn-Sham density functional theory (KS-DFT). We align the learning objectives and architectures of GSMs with the governing equations of KS-DFT by enforcing physical constraints and removing optimization pressure on unphysical or irrelevant degrees of freedom. In our size-extrapolation experiments from QM9 to QM40, our combined contributions OrthoNormal-Loss (ON-Loss) and Grassmann Restricted Occupied-Orbital Training (GROOT) reach a 79.1% energy and 83.4% force mean absolute error (MAE) reduction over previous state-of-the-art density GSMs. For Hamiltonian GSMs, ON-Loss and Residual Optimal-gauge Conditioning-aware KS-Eq. Training (ROCKET) together reduce the energy and force MAEs of the strongest baseline by 99.8% and 95.9%, respectively. Using a self-consistency rejection criterion, we filter out extrapolation errors on QMugs, rejecting fewer than 0.4% of predictions while reaching an energy MAE of 0.07 mHa. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of label-free self-consistency fine-tuning, and transfer GSMs to reactive chemistry in Transition1x, reaching energy errors below chemical accuracy.

Mid-infrared photothermal (MIP) measurement probes refractive-index changes induced by mid-infrared (MIR) absorption using visible or near-infrared light and has recently emerged as a powerful modality for MIR spectro-imaging in the life sciences. Reducing measurement noise allows the probe power to be lowered without compromising the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), thereby mitigating the risk of sample damage. However, even in the absence of classical noise, the SNR of conventional MIP measurements using a classical coherent probe is fundamentally limited by shot noise. Here, we demonstrate sub-shot-noise MIP measurement using twin beams generated through seeded optical parametric amplification. Balanced detection of the twin beams suppresses the noise by more than 5 dB below the shot-noise level established using a coherent beam. As a proof-of-principle demonstration, we measure the MIP signal from liquid water using balanced twin-beam detection and achieve an SNR enhancement of more than 2 dB over the balanced coherent-beam detection.

Deep thermalization indicates the emergence of universal ensembles of pure states in a subsystem after measuring its environment. We investigate this phenomenon in a free-fermion chain using local measurements that preserve Gaussianity and break particle-number conservation. Although the measurement outcomes provide partial information about local conserved charges within a finite subsystem, we argue that this information becomes negligible in the thermodynamic limit. This effective non-revelation underlies the emergence of a fermionic Gaussian Scrooge ensemble, determined by the subsystem's generalized Gibbs ensemble. We construct this universal ensemble directly at the subsystem level and provide numerical evidence that it describes the late-time projected ensemble at finite temperature. Our results extend the description of thermalization in non-interacting integrable systems beyond the reduced density matrix to universal statistics of conditional pure states.

Non-Markovian open quantum networks are among the most challenging problems in quantum theory, as they suffer from both, the exponentially scaling many-body state space as well as long memory times when the sites are strongly coupled to structured environments. Recent efforts to address them by combining tensor networks with real-time path integrals, such as TEMPO and process tensors, were however limited to systems with rather weak system-environment couplings because strong couplings lead to large bond dimensions. Here, we devise a tensor network scheme (CTEMPO) resulting in particularly small bond dimensions for single-site problems. We then extend this to a practical scheme to simulate non-Markovian quantum networks by time-evolving a corresponding comb tensor network. Benchmarking the single-site algorithm on the spin-boson model we find orders-of-magnitude improvement over established methods. The multi-site algorithm is shown to solve the notoriously difficult problem of the 7-site Fenna-Matthews-Olson photosynthetic complex, whose spectral density contains 62 peaks. We then apply our approach to explore the scaling behavior of the superradiance of up to $N=20$ quantum dots individually coupled to super-Ohmic phonon baths. Our approach provides a turnkey solution to non-Markovian quantum networks and is compatible with more general tensor network topologies.

Quantum libraries are now critical infrastructure for quantum algorithm development, yet their correctness remains difficult to test. Existing testing techniques mainly rely on failure-based or comparison-based oracles, exposing bugs only when executions fail, violate runtime checks, or disagree with another implementation. Their applicability is limited when suitable execution-based oracles are unavailable, leaving some silent bugs undetected. Such missed bugs can produce incorrect results that propagate into experimental conclusions, simulation studies, and algorithmic designs. Here we present QuSema, an autonomous testing agent for finding silent bugs in quantum libraries. QuSema uses constraints from quantum semantics and documentation as a source-level semantic oracle to assess whether implementation logic can produce invalid outputs from valid inputs. It operates through an agentic loop that repeatedly inspects library API documentation and source code, reasons about the intended behavior of quantum operations, identifies potential semantic deviations, and validates them by generating executable tests through library APIs. Guided by quantum-domain reasoning, QuSema turns high-level behavioral mismatches into concrete, user-triggerable bug reports, enabling it to uncover non-crash defects. We implement QuSema for Qiskit and PennyLane. On a benchmark of 20 historical silent bugs, QuSema achieves higher mean bug relocation counts than Claude Code and Codex, with the DeepSeek configuration costing less than Claude Code. QuSema also discovers 40 previously unknown bugs confirmed by the developers, including 30 silent bugs.

Training parameterized quantum circuits requires balancing optimization progress with limited evaluation budgets and the statistical uncertainty of near-term quantum hardware. We present a modular benchmarking framework that separates quantum search-direction estimation from classical parameter-update rules, allowing their interactions and sensitivities to be examined independently. We evaluate a suite of gradient-based, stochastic, and derivative-free optimizers across combinatorial optimization using the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), supervised quantum machine learning using Iris classification and a quantum convolutional neural network (QCNN) for binary MNIST classification, and quantum chemistry using the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) for molecular hydrogen. By separating objective evaluations from sample-circuit costs under finite-shot simulation and physical execution on a 156-qubit processor, we compare optimizer behavior across workloads with different parameter counts and measurement requirements. Four selected simulator and hardware case studies report terminal and best observed objectives separately, alongside post-training classifier accuracies. The comparisons include selected MaxCut and hydrogen trajectories and illustrate workload-dependent objective changes and evaluation costs, while the simulator benchmark compares both peak and mean performance across three seeds. The hardware runs do not establish an optimizer ranking or isolate a causal effect of device noise.

We construct an explicit binary linear system game that separates \(C_{qa}\), the closure of the set of finite dimensional quantum correlations, from \(C_{qc}\), the set of commuting operator correlations. The game admits a perfect commuting operator strategy, while every correlation in \(C_{qa}\) has a success probability strictly less than 1. This provides a concrete counterexample to Tsirelson's problem in its approximation form. The defining system has \(1{,}417{,}152\) equations in \(1{,}889{,}684\) variables, with exactly three nonzero coefficients per equation and a single nonzero entry on the right hand side. We also compute the classical value exactly. The complete system is specified in Lean~4, and the separation and exact classical value are formalized using Mathlib.

Scientific dynamics forecasting is often framed as an architecture choice, although deployment is also determined by observed history, rollout feedback, compute budget, physical objective, and test distribution. We formulate protocol-dependent model selection and introduce ProtocolMatch, a compute-matched, validation-selected, and failure-preserving evaluation framework. On driven quantum-spin dynamics, we compare recurrent, patched-attention, causal-attention, and low-rank linear predictors across three independently generated datasets. The causal-attention--recurrence ordering reverses as the training set grows within a fixed two-spin task, while a linear predictor has the lowest mean error in the six-spin local-observable comparison. Restricting observed history worsens every refreshed-history view but improves every closed-loop view in the four-spin study. A latest-state MLP has lower error than persistence on every dataset under state refresh across all five cells, yet its closed-loop rank varies by system and includes finite explosive errors. Physical penalties improve targeted consistency without reliably improving prediction error, and in-distribution intervals lose most coverage after a driving-frequency shift. Thus scientific model selection should return a predictor with its protocol and report accuracy, physical validity, and shifted-distribution reliability separately.

We investigate the dynamics of quantum ergotropy in a multipartite system of two-level atoms interacting with a quantized field. The role of multipartite quantum mutual information and quantum relative entropy is analyzed to understand how correlations and the distinguishability between the passive state and the product of local states affect the extractable work. Numerical results for systems containing two to five atoms show that the maximum ergotropy does not increase linearly with the system size, while the intervals of zero ergotropy are gradually modified and suppressed for larger systems. We also study the effect of the average thermal photon number and different initial atomic states. Increasing the thermal photon number mainly reduces the relative-entropy contribution, whereas the initial state strongly influences both the magnitude and persistence of ergotropy. Among the considered states, the partially entangled state provides the largest and more persistent extractable work, while the mixed GHZ state gives the smallest ergotropy. These results highlight the importance of multipartite correlations, thermal effects, and state preparation in controlling quantum work extraction and may be useful for future studies of quantum batteries and quantum power.

Quantum sources of light are of paramount importance for the development of photonic quantum technologies. The growing demand for bright, efficient, and spectrally engineered photonic sources for applications in quantum sensing, spectroscopy, and imaging has motivated the development of tailored nonlinear crystals. Here, we report on the development and characterization of chirped, apodized KTP crystals specifically engineered for quantum spectroscopy. Our source exhibits an unprecedented bandwidth in a highly non-degenerate configuration, demonstrating its potential to support quantum spectroscopy protocols over broad spectral ranges while enabling significantly shorter measurement times.

The security of a secret sharing protocol is compromised if one or more dishonest participants can reconstruct the secret by deviating from the prescribed protocol, particularly when such malicious behavior remains undetected. Semi-Quantum Secret Sharing (SQSS) is a variant of secret sharing in which the participants possess only classical capabilities, such as preparing and measuring qubits in the computational ($Z$) basis, while a quantum-capable third party assists the dealer in generating and distributing quantum shares of a classical secret. The limited quantum capabilities of the participants in SQSS protocols may introduce vulnerabilities to collusion attacks, enabling an assisting quantum third party, in collaboration with a dishonest classical participant, to jointly recover the secret even without detection. In this work, we propose a novel SQSS protocol that eliminates this vulnerability and achieves information-theoretic security against collusion attacks. We further prove that the proposed protocol is secure against a broad class of external and internal attacks. Finally, a comparative analysis demonstrates that our construction advances existing SQSS protocols by simultaneously optimizing qubit efficiency, involves a classical dealer, and resilience against DCNA attacks using basic Bell states.

Any two orthogonal quantum states can be perfectly distinguished via local operations and classical communication (LOCC), yet whether all orthogonal multipartite pairs incur an identical operational cost remains an open question. Here, we address the resource consumption required for local state discrimination across multipartite pair of states. We demonstrate that distinct pairs of orthogonal multipartite maximally entangled states require unequal amounts of quantum resources to achieve local distinguishability. Extending our framework beyond individual pairs, we analyze larger sets of both locally distinguishable and indistinguishable multipartite orthogonal states, revealing a nontrivial hierarchy in their entanglement consumption. These results show that the resource cost of LOCC discrimination is state-dependent, providing insight into the fine-grained structure of multipartite nonlocality.

Understanding the non-equilibrium dynamics of quantum many-body systems plays a central role in modern many-body physics. Intriguing insights emerge from investigating how quantum resources, which are essential for achieving unambiguous quantumness, are generated and spread under chaotic quantum dynamics. In fermionic systems, non-Gaussianity constitutes an important resource beyond entanglement, characterizing the deviation of generic quantum states from free-fermion states. In this Letter, we propose using the \textit{replica twist entropy}, defined through the expectation value of a replica rotation operator with a tunable angle $α$, as a natural probe of non-Gaussianity in pure fermionic states. After deriving its behavior for typical many-body states, we establish a general framework for analyzing the replica twist entropy in solvable Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev models in the large-$N$ limit. Applying this framework to the dynamics of the thermofield double state, we uncover a novel dynamical phase diagram in the parameter space of $α$ and evolution time $t$, exhibiting spontaneous $Z_2$ symmetry breaking at $α=π/4$ and universal cusps as a function of $α$ in the long-time regime. Our results pave the way for studying non-Gaussianity in strongly correlated fermionic systems and reveal a new class of dynamical transitions probed by non-Gaussianity.

Wigner negativity has been shown to be a resource in quantum computing, raising the question of how to efficiently produce states with a large Wigner negativity. Cubic Gaussian states, obtained when a cubic gate is applied to a Gaussian state, have been proposed as candidates for this purpose. We show that cubic Gaussian states with a large Wigner negativity $\mathcal N$ necessarily have a short decoherence time $τ$ that is bounded above by $\mathcal N^{-2}$. In other words, a large Wigner negativity comes at a cost: the decoherence time $τ$ of cubic Gaussian states decreases at least quadratically in the negativity $\mathcal N$. Maximizing $τ$ at fixed Wigner negativity $\mathcal N$, we show that this upper bound is reached by optimal cubic Gaussian states. They have the property that for large negativity, the optimal squeezing scales as $\ln\mathcal N$ and the optimal cubicity as $\mathcal N^{-1}$. Optimal cubic Gaussian states with large negativity can therefore be constructed with small cubicity, provided sufficient squeezing is applied. However, their decoherence time decreases with growing negativity. In addition, we show that their preparation is extremely sensitive to thermal noise. Finally, we compare, for each integer $n$, the optimal cubic Gaussian state with the $n$th Fock state that has the same negativity: despite their pronounced differences in photon number distribution and Wigner function, we show that they have similar, be it slightly larger, decoherence times and entanglement generating potential through a beam splitter.

Many Quantum Field Theory models, either designed to improve the ultraviolet behavior via higher derivative terms or aimed at providing unified descriptions of Gravity, inevitably introduce negative-energy 'ghosts' states. These states raise fundamental questions regarding the stability of the theory. In this study, we investigate the time evolution of simplified quantum mechanical models consisting of two coupled normal and ghost subsystems. Although the full spectrum of these models is unbounded from below and, therefore, lacks a true ground state, we focus the time evolution of a 'would-be ground state': a zero-energy eigenstate of the decoupled system. By analyzing its metastability under interactions, we gain insights into the dynamics of ghost-like states. Contrary to the standard paradigm, our results demonstrate that, across a broad range of couplings, the would-be ground state does not decay and remains dynamically stable over long times. This provides evidence towards resolving the stability problems of Hamiltonians that are unbounded from below. We also discuss the connections with the corresponding classical and semiclassical dynamics.

We study continuous-time quantum walks on connected strongly regular graphs that are not complete, observed at a random time drawn from a freely chosen probability law. Uniform average mixing (UAM) asks for a law under which every averaged transition probability equals $1/n$, where $n$ is the number of vertices. On a strongly regular graph this is equivalent to two affine constraints on three cosine moments. We construct a bounded, compactly supported time density for every strongly regular graph with nonintegral eigenvalues. For integral spectra we give an exact finite Toeplitz criterion and its Hankel form. Every averaged mixing matrix of such a graph is realized by at most two observation times. Three elementary inequalities on the moment line, which also give a short proof of Chan's classification of complex Hadamard matrices in the Bose-Mesner algebra, lead to a determination of all strongly regular graphs that admit UAM. Apart from the conference graphs of nonsquare order and the graphs with instantaneous uniform mixing, these are the members of two infinite families of parameter sets and their complements, and for them we give explicit laws with two observation times. The Petersen graph and its complement are the smallest members. A strongly regular graph with UAM admits a bounded time density exactly when it has no instantaneous uniform mixing. We also correct the classification of instantaneous uniform mixing on strongly regular graphs by Godsil, Mullin and Roy. Its sign condition excludes the halved $5$-cube, which mixes uniformly at time $π/4$. With the order $4θ^2$ read literally, its parity condition also excludes the Clebsch graph and includes the parameters $(36,14,4,6)$, for which no time law gives uniform average mixing.

The joint expectation values of quantum observables measured by two parties typically depend on the causal structure of the measurement protocol. The two causal structures we investigate here are the direct-cause scenario, in which a single quantum state is measured twice in series with a general quantum channel between measurements, and the common-cause scenario, in which a shared bipartite quantum state is measured in parallel. Through a variety of examples of qubit channels with tunable parameters, we identify the full set of input states where the direct-cause joint expectation values of Pauli observables coincide with those obtained from a common cause, a situation that we call causal confusion. More generally, for arbitrary finite-dimensional quantum systems and light-touch observables, we prove that a channel exhibits causal confusion for some input state if and only if it is a positive-partial-transpose (PPT) channel, thereby endowing PPT channels with a new operational meaning in terms of causal confusion. Using this result, we characterize the set of qubit channels for which there exists an input state leading to causal confusion as the set of entanglement-breaking channels.

We investigate how cotunneling affects passive-state ordering in a Photosystem II reaction center modelled as a nonequilibrium molecular junction. We use a full pigment excitation manifold, with excitonic and charge-transfer rates computed within a Nakajima-Zwanzig formalism using realistic spectral densities. Cotunneling is introduced through a microscopically constructed doubly reduced acceptor state obtained from relevant quinone-side two-electron configurations, while photoexcitation is allowed into the full excitonic manifold. Passive-state permutations are quantified through ergotropy and energetic capacitance. We find that thermodynamic smoothness in ergotropy and energetic capacitance can conceal microscopic state rearrangements. Cotunneling redistributes the extractable nonequilibrium energy among the quinone acceptor, the donor-pheophytin radical pair, and excitonic states with strong contributions from pigments on the inactive branch. At high Coulomb interaction, cotunneling produces no passive-state reordering. Piecewise-linear relations among ergotropy, energetic capacitance, and mean energy further reveal the population reorderings generated by cotunneling.

Dissipation is generally regarded as detrimental to nonclassical-state generation, yet whether it can determine which quantum resource is emitted from an open hybrid quantum system remains largely unexplored. Here, we show that the symmetry of bosonic dissipation channels can select and switch quantum-emission pathways in a tripartite Mollow system, where a strongly driven two-level emitter simultaneously couples to cavity photons and motional phonons. In the Mollow regime, higher-order tripartite interactions generate resonant photon-phonon pair excitations, whose emitted quantum states are subsequently selected by dissipation. Under symmetric dissipation, the system produces strongly correlated photon-phonon pairs, enabling both single-pair emission and correlated multipair bundles with pronounced nonclassical correlations. Breaking the dissipation symmetry progressively suppresses the hybrid correlations and dynamically decouples the photonic and phononic degrees of freedom. In the strongly asymmetric regime, long-lived phonons accumulate in highly excited Fock states, while rapidly leaking cavity photons are converted into high-purity single-photon and two-photon bundles. The crossover between these distinct emission regimes is characterized through time-resolved correlation functions, Fock-state distributions, and Wigner quasiprobability distributions. Our results establish dissipation symmetry as a resource for steering quantum emission between hybrid and purely photonic nonclassical states, providing a route toward programmable hybrid quantum emitters and dissipative quantum-state engineering.

Data reuploading---repeatedly encoding classical inputs at multiple layers of a parameterized quantum circuit---is a central mechanism for enhancing the expressivity of quantum neural networks (QNNs). Building on the Fourier-theoretic framework of Schuld et al.~\cite{schuld2021fourier}, we study the frequency spectrum of the general multivariate, $R$-reupload architecture (QDR). (i) We make explicit that the accessible frequencies form the set $K_R=S^{(R)}-S^{(R)}$, which equals the $R$-fold sumset $T^{(R)}$ of the difference set $T=S-S$ of the encoding spectrum, and we characterise it exactly: $K_R=\{k\in\mathcal L:\ \ell_T(k)\le R\}$, where $\mathcal L=\mathrm{span}_{\mathbb Z}(T)$ is an integer lattice and $\ell_T$ is word length in $T$. (ii) We show that the \emph{directions} of the spectrum stabilise already at $R=1$ (the real span of $K_R$ equals that of $\mathcal L$), whereas the spectrum itself never saturates: the maximal frequency grows linearly in $R$ and the number of frequencies grows polynomially, as $Θ(R^{m})$ with $m=\mathrm{rank}\,\mathcal L$. (iii) Using the spectrum size, we give a Rademacher-complexity bound on the capacity of QDRs of order $\sqrt{|K_R|/n}$. (iv) We report experiments on function approximation and classification with train/test splits, several seeds and parameter-matched classical baselines. The simulated spectra match the theory exactly. A single-qubit QDR beats a matched MLP on several smooth or periodic univariate targets and on the spiral task, but it is clearly worse on multivariate regression ($d\ge4$), where it is highly sensitive to the input-encoding scale; it beats the MLP only on equations with $d\le3$ inputs.

Which execution details must a quantum computation retain, and to what precision, to support a declared comparison? We define a sufficient record by the largest Hellinger distance between outcome laws that share it. Our main result is a circuit-derived certificate for continuous recording precision: independent channel-mixture probabilities enter through the affinity of latent noise flags, while coherent rotation differences enter through conditional quantum fidelity. Their joint composition bounds whole record cells without simulating their outcome distributions. For four-qubit QAOA at depth one, a 13-bit comparison record guarantees distance below 0.05 throughout a declared continuous noise box, uniformly over programmed angles when comparisons hold the logical task fixed. A construction with observable noise flags attains the general bound. Exact tensorization of Hellinger affinity connects recording precision to the length of a future measurement transcript. On finite context classes, separation witnesses certify minimum-cost field retention; a four-field record is the unique minimum for 28 archived QAOA instances. Fresh six-qubit processor measurements establish different minimum label counts at one common tolerance: two labels are necessary and sufficient for raw laws, while one suffices after a fixed decoder for a synthetic image-segmentation task. These hardware conclusions are conditional on stationary independent shots and remain distinct from the analytic channel certificate. Shared task definitions and evidential archives are retained separately. The framework specifies which execution distinctions matter, how precisely to record them, and what evidence supports the resulting agreement guarantee.

Normal-mode splitting reveals coherent cavity--magnon hybridization but does not certify finite-time quantum-state transfer. We describe quantum transfer in a passive, linear cavity--magnon system coupled to thermal reservoirs as a thermal-loss channel specified by its coherent transmissivity $η$ and output-referred thermal population $ν$. For single-rail qubits, we calculate the phase-corrected average fidelity and compare it with the deterministic measure-and-prepare benchmark of $2/3$. A Bell pair shared by the cavity and an isolated reference retains reference--magnon entanglement if and only if $η>ν$. An input squeezed vacuum of strength $r$ yields sub-vacuum magnon fluctuations if and only if $ν<η(1-e^{-2r})/2$. When the initial magnon and both reservoirs have the same occupation, an analytically determined peak-transmissivity time optimizes all three tasks. These task-dependent benchmarks show that a conventional linewidth-based strong-coupling criterion does not guarantee quantum-transfer performance. Conversely, entanglement or squeezing can survive below that spectroscopic reference when the added noise is sufficiently low. These benchmarks provide quantitative targets for transfer timing and thermal-noise control in intracavity-to-magnon quantum interfaces.

Multipartite interactions provide a unique route to generate hybrid quantum states, yet their intrinsically weak nonlinear coupling limits the controllable manipulation of the resulting correlations. Here we show that cooperative double squeezing and cavity Kerr nonlinearity together enable controllable engineering of Kerr-filtered hybrid states in a tripartite spin-photon-phonon system. Double squeezing exponentially enhances the spin-mediated photon-phonon pair-generation channel, whereas the Kerr interaction selectively reshapes the photonic component while maintaining the underlying tripartite conversion process. This mechanism reconstructs the composition of the hybrid excitation and gives rise to a fourfold phase-space manifold associated with spontaneous $Z_{2}^{(a)}\times Z_{2}^{(b)}$ parity breaking. Our results reveal a strategy for engineering hybrid quantum states by combining interaction amplification with mode-selective nonlinear filtering.

Directional quantum light requires asymmetric photon statistics without sacrificing coherence between propagation paths, a combination that remains difficult to achieve within a single quantum-optical platform. Here we identify a microscopic path-complementarity mechanism in hybridized cavity polaritons that reconciles these two requirements. In a Zeeman-split ring-cavity QED system, cavity backscattering hybridizes the counterpropagating modes, whereas the Zeeman splitting creates spectrally asymmetric excitation channels. Their interplay gives rise, under weak driving, to directional photon blockade coexisting with strong single-photon path entanglement: one input direction exhibits antibunching while the opposite direction is bunched. Remarkably, switching between the two one-photon polariton resonances reverses both the photon-statistical and intensity asymmetries while nearly preserving the path concurrence over a broad parameter regime. Our results establish path complementarity as a general design principle for directional nonclassical light with retained quantum coherence.

We show that an $N$-site quantum Rabi ring with matched giant-atom couplings has $2^N$ degenerate superradiant configurations as the atomic-to-cavity frequency ratio $η=Δ/ω$ tends to infinity. Each atom couples to two cavities two sites apart, and the photon hopping carries a phase $π/2$. Tuning the ratio of contact strengths to the photon hopping reduces the mean-field energy to a sum of single-site Rabi energies, with a common critical coupling for all momentum-pair sectors. The degeneracy survives quadratic quantum fluctuations despite a dispersive excitation spectrum. At finite $η$, second-order processes involving the local cubic anharmonicity generate a same-sublattice Ising coupling of order $ω/η$, selecting ferro- and antiferro-superradiant configurations. This quantum order-by-disorder effect has no classical counterpart. Four-site calculations retaining all spin states quantitatively support the predicted energy coefficients. The separation between the induced coupling and the excitation gap allows a broad temperature interval with macroscopic photon occupation and short-range correlations between displacement signs.

Inspired by quantum metrology, we propose a coherent consensus primitive to enhance the collaborative performance of independent quantum classifiers at the decision boundary. The basic idea consists of three steps: i) prepare a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state on $n$ qubits; ii) apply a relative phase to each qubit, which encodes the output of one classifier; and iii) undo the GHZ preparation to collect all phases onto the first qubit. The signal is amplified by a factor of $n$, which reduces the sampling error by a factor of $\sqrt{n}$ relative to incoherent majority voting, that is, the direct combination of estimates from individual classifiers. Coherent consensus is valid for general estimation and classification of phases. We derive guarantees on the resources needed to estimate phases using this coherent consensus primitive as compared to majority voting. We implement both techniques on a trapped-ion quantum computer using a given ensemble of imperfect phase gates. We observe the expected $\sqrt{n}$ gain in precision of coherent consensus, with excess dispersion at the largest $n$ consistent with device drift. Coherent consensus can thus be understood as a form of sensing inside a quantum computer.

Part I: Semiclassical Gravity Efficiently Solves $\mathsf{NP}$-Complete Problems Assuming the gravitational field is classical and that it couples to quantum fields via the semiclassical Einstein field equations (EFEs), we show that the weak-field dynamics of a massive and non-relativistic qubit can in principle be used to solve an $\mathsf{NP}$-complete problem in polynomial time. We attribute this vast computational power to the non-linear qubit dynamics afforded by the semiclassical EFEs. Consequently, the above two assumptions entail a violation of the Physical Extended Church--Turing Thesis, which we regard as evidence for the quantization of gravity. Part II: Spacetime Quasicrystals We generalize self-similar quasicrystals, such as the Penrose tilings, from Euclidean space to Minkowski spacetime. We construct the first examples of Lorentzian quasicrystals and identify their key novel features. We then explore possible connections to fundamental physics. First, we propose a speculative scenario in which our $(3+1)$D universe is embedded in a particularly symmetric $(9+1)$D torus $\mathbb{T}^{9,1}$, previously identified as the most symmetric toroidal compactification of the superstring. We suggest that this construction may shed light on the seesaw relation $M_{\rm Pl}M_{\rm vac} \approx M_{\rm EW}^{2}$ between the Planck, vacuum-energy, and electroweak scales. Second, we replace the random causal sets of causal set theory with ordered, highly symmetric quasi-crystalline causal sets. We find suggestive evidence that our quasicrystals outperform Poisson random sets in the number-volume correspondence in both $(1+1)$D and $(3+1)$D, where such behaviour has been conjectured to be impossible. Finally, extending hyperuniformity from space to spacetime, we show that our $(1+1)$D quasicrystal is the first demonstrated example of a spacetime-hyperuniform structure.

There exist two different paradigms for records in isolated quantum systems: decoherent histories (which determines which past events leave formal records) and quantum Darwinism (which determines which current events get redundantly recorded). Neither one implies the other, and connections between the two are scarcely investigated. We unify quantum Darwinism and decoherent histories based on the insight that only redundant records about past events matter. The resulting framework of past redundancy encompasses quantum Darwinism when applied to events at the current time, and it connects redundancy to decoherence of histories and the probability sum rule via the Bhattacharyya coefficient (or fidelity). Importantly, various examples show that past redundancy is a more widespread phenomenon than the fine-tuned models necessary for quantum Darwinism suggest. We thus arrive at a richer picture in which redundancy can be caused by mechanisms different from quantum Darwinism (such as macroevents or cascade structures), which emphasizes that redundancy is necessary but not sufficient for objectivity, and which, overall, allows to realistically investigate the question: how generic is redundancy in nature?

The Color-of-Money (CoM) problem is a financial optimization challenge in which enterprises must determine how to allocate and route funds across multiple accounts, currencies, and time periods while satisfying regulatory, operational, and liquidity constraints. As the number of assets, obligations, and planning periods increases, the decision space grows rapidly, making large-scale optimization increasingly challenging for classical approaches. In this work, we present a proof-of-concept quantum implementation of the CoM problem using IBM Quantum hardware. The original optimization problem is formulated as a constrained Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem and transformed into a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) representation suitable for quantum execution. We employ a Variational Quantum Algorithm (VQA) with Pauli Correlation Encoding (PCE), a qubit efficient encoding technique and apply error-mitigation technique to improve solution fidelity on noisy quantum hardware. A prototype instance consisting of 3 assets, 3 obligations, and 2 time periods was executed on real IBM quantum hardware and benchmarked against classical exact solver SCIP. The quantum approach successfully reproduced the same optimal solution obtained classically, validating the correctness and feasibility of the proposed methodology. While current noisy quantum hardware does not outperform classical optimization on the evaluated small instance, the results demonstrate the feasibility of executing treasury optimization workloads on current quantum hardware and provide a foundation for future investigations.

Oblivious transfer (OT) is a fundamental cryptographic primitive that is useful for realizing any two-party computation. Since information-theoretically secure perfect OT is impossible classically and quantumly, research has focused on imperfect protocols, exploring how close to perfect one can get against unbounded dishonest parties. While current approaches often make use of pure quantum states, recent work suggests that mixed quantum states may improve performance. In this paper, we investigate the use of mixed quantum states in Rabin oblivious transfer, where a sender holds one bit and a receiver learns its value with a certain probability while the sender remains ignorant of whether the receiver learned it. We present three mixed-state protocols constructed with two distinct methods, extending an existing pure-state scheme and employing a probabilistic approach, and demonstrate improved performance compared to classical and quantum pure-state protocols across varying parameters.

This work is devoted to a theoretical study of the interaction of a quantum three-level ladder system with a continuous electromagnetic field in a one-dimensional open waveguide. We consider a situation closely resembling stimulated emission - the scattering of a single-photon exponential pulse by an excited three-level emitter. Using the real-space formalism, we obtain an analytical expression for the wavefunction of our system. We show that, for the low anharmonicity of a three-level system inherent to a transmon (the most common type of artificial atom), the influence of the third level can have a significant effect on the system's behavior. Namely, the presence of the third level largely suppresses the stimulated emission effect if the relative anharmonicity is lower than $| α_r | < 4\%$. However, for a three-level system, it is possible to obtain correlation effects such as photon bunching in the reflected field, which can also be 'switched off' by tuning the incident photon parameters.

We present an automated method for reducing fault-tolerant circuits through fault-equivalent rewrites. Starting from a known fault-tolerant circuit, the search applies non-reducing enabling rules to expose Bell-pair reductions, each of which removes an ancilla preparation and a CNOT gate. Because every search transition preserves fault equivalence, the resulting circuits inherit the fault-tolerance properties of the input circuit. Candidate circuits are evaluated using circuit-level Monte Carlo simulation. For Shor-style syndrome extraction with the $[[7,1,3]]$ code, our method reduces one syndrome-measurement round from 30 to 18 ancilla preparations and from 54 to 42 CNOT gates. At a physical two-qubit error rate of $p = 10^{-3}$, the optimized circuit lowers the logical error rate by approximately 21% for both logical basis states. The reduction ranges from 13% to 23% over a range of $p$ spanning two orders of magnitude. We also apply the method to Steane-based dynamic syndrome extraction constructed from Goto's verified logical-$\lvert 0 \rangle$ preparation, in which the verification qubit serves as a flag. The search selects a circuit using four ancillas and 14 CNOT gates, matching the resource counts of the previous design but with an improved CNOT depth. Under depolarizing idle noise at $3p/10$ the selected circuit lowers the logical error rate by approximately 15% for both logical basis states, and by approximately $10%$ at $p/10$. These results demonstrate that automated fault-equivalent rewriting can identify circuits with lower resource costs or improved logical performance without separately verifying the fault tolerance of every candidate.

Standard quantum mechanics takes the complex numbers as its scalar algebra. We ask whether this complex structure is algebraically fundamental or may instead form a distinguished embedded sector of a larger commutative and associative scalar algebra. Requiring the ordinary complex sector to remain intact while admitting an additional stable complex-like analytic sector turns the latter into a proper ideal, makes zero divisors unavoidable in finite dimension, and implies a lower bound of four real dimensions. The bicomplex algebra realizes this minimum, and under an additional compatibility assumption the four-dimensional realization is unique up to isomorphism. The resulting algebra exhibits two distinct decompositions: the canonical decomposition into orthogonal idempotent ideals and a decomposition adapted to the embedded complex sector and the additional ideal-valued sector. The ordinary complex scalars therefore lie diagonally across the canonical idempotent decomposition. The ideal sector supports Taylor series, oscillatory exponentials, Fourier-type kernels, and Schrödinger-type expressions, and carries a formal ideal-valued eigenvalue structure. Restricting the Born rule to the embedded complex sector recovers its standard form. Whether this dual scalar architecture has physical significance beyond the algebraic framework remains an open question.

Multimode entangled states of light are key resources for high-dimensional photonic quantum technologies, particularly for continuous-variable quantum computing and quantum information processing. Exploiting their full capabilities requires detection strategies that can efficiently and simultaneously access a large number of modes and their quantum correlations. Multimode optical parametric amplification (MOPA) provides a promising approach by amplifying multiple quadratures prior to detection, rendering the measurement robust against subsequent optical losses while enabling broadband operation. Here, we demonstrate the spectral multimode capability of MOPA by simultaneously characterizing a broadband 60-node dual-rail continuous-variable cluster state. We reconstruct the cluster-state nullifiers across the spectral modes and observe nearly uniform squeezing ranging from -7.2 to -6.5 dB. Furthermore, by evaluating the van Loock-Furusawa criterion across all relevant bipartitions, we verify genuine multipartite entanglement throughout the 60-node state. These results establish MOPA as a promising platform for scalable high-dimensional quantum information processing in the spectral domain.

Quantum kernel methods are leading candidates for a practical quantum advantage in machine learning, but assessing that potential requires two quantities usually reported separately: how well a kernel performs on the task, and how far its geometry departs from the classical kernels available for the same problem. We introduce a fully unsupervised, multi-objective protocol that optimises simultaneously the normalised pseudo discrepancy (NPD), a label-free proxy for anomaly detection quality, and the geometric difference (GD) to a tuned classical reference kernel, selecting models from the resulting Pareto front. We apply it to malware beaconing detection in real network traffic, using a one-class support vector machine with fidelity and projected quantum kernels over four data encodings, on simulators and on IQM's 20-qubit Garnet processor. NPD-guided selection alone finds a fidelity kernel that beats the tuned classical baseline, but with a geometric difference too small to certify the gain as quantum. Projected kernels reach far larger geometric differences; the Pareto-selected one only marginally exceeds the baseline (AUC $0.782$ versus $0.765$, $g_{C\to Q}\approx 89>\sqrt{N}$ relative to that reference kernel), still below the NPD-selected fidelity kernel ($0.840$).

Quantum emitters in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) are promising building blocks for solid-state quantum photonics because of their bright room-temperature emission. These emitters strongly interact with lattice vibrations, which partially underpins their excitation efficiency. Here, using complementary cathodoluminescence (CL) and photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy, we demonstrate cavity-mediated interactions between hBN quantum emitters coupled to the same plasmonic Au void cavity at the room temperature. Cathodoluminescence measurements reveal that a vibronic transition of the 443 nm emitter hybridizes with the cavity mode, giving rise to a spectrally resolved splitting, while the neighboring 537 nm emitter remains in the weak-coupling regime despite spectral overlap. The energy split of the CL peak is at the order of 36.2 meV, whereas the PL-resolved peak is approximately 24.1 meV, which is due to the collective excitations of multiple emitters per electron excitation and their mutual interactions. Maxwell-Bloch simulations reproduce the experimental spectra and identify the observed splitting as the result of cavity-induced hybridization. Excitation-dependent PL further shows that the hybridized state can be accessed through phonon-assisted excitations below the zero-phonon transition. These results demonstrate that vibronic transitions provide an effective pathway for controlling interactions between multiple quantum emitters in hybrid plasmonic nanophotonic systems.

Variational two-particle reduced-density-matrix methods impose hierarchies of semidefinite constraints. We ask whether a fixed level of such a hierarchy can recover even an elementary many-fermion spectrum, using the dispersion test, in which a value is accepted as an eigenvalue when the minimized dispersion vanishes. For an exactly solvable operator that counts fermions in one half of the spin orbitals, whose spectrum consists of integers, we determine the complete set of accepted values at every level of the full hierarchy of particle-hole semidefinite constraints. Besides the integers, this set contains an entire interval of noninteger values unless the hierarchy level grows linearly with the particle number, and we give the exact threshold. The proof constructs explicit pseudo reduced density matrices that are diagonal in the occupation basis, obtained by continuing the occupation probabilities of a fixed-particle-number state to a noninteger particle number. Classical semidefinite constraints on occupation correlations, supplemented by nonnegative occupation-pattern probabilities, suffice to establish fermionic positivity. For this counting model the two relaxations have the same dispersion zero set, not necessarily the same feasible states, and a converse argument shows that no other false eigenvalues occur. The limitation is specific to the hierarchy: two-body inequalities that encode the integer spectrum would remove every false value but are not generated at a fixed level. We also verify that the full semidefinite constraints and their complete projection onto two-particle reduced-density-matrix space are equivalent in finite dimensions, so that the result applies equally to the polar formulation.

A KMS-symmetric quantum Markov semigroup is completely determined by the quadratic form in induces on the GNS Hilbert space. The quadratic forms that arise in this way are called quantum Dirichlet forms. In this article we give a complete description of bounded quantum Dirichlet forms in terms of derivations. In particular, we exhibit an explicit characterization of the bounded quantum Dirichlet forms on type I factors. We also show that any unbounded quantum Dirichlet form can be represented in terms of derivations. The key technical insight is that the modular group always restricts to a strongly continuous group on the domain of a quantum Dirichlet form such that the square root of the analytic generator is accretive with respect to the form norm.

Identifying and measuring topological invariants remains a fundamental challenge due to the non-local nature of momentum eigenstates in real space. Established approaches based on Bloch oscillations, quantum walks, charge pumping and quench dynamics, typically fail to provide direct momentum-dependent geometric information of each Bloch state. Here, we propose a novel framework for implementing direct band-topology tomography via momentum-selective measurements, and experimentally demonstrate it on a superconducting processor featuring a highly connected coupling architecture. Utilizing a ``star-like" geometry in which an auxiliary probe couples to a one-dimensional topological chain with spatially modulated coupling strengths, we selectively address the desired momentum states of the chain. This approach enables the direct and robust extraction of the winding phase that contributes to the associated topological invariant. Leveraging non-local couplers bridged by long tantalum airbridges, we realize an extended Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model and map its full topological phase diagram. Through a nested Fourier analysis over time and space, we directly extract the winding phase across Brillouin zone and resolve quantized winding numbers of $ν=\{0,\pm1,2\}$ characterized by phase winding $\{0, \pm 2π,4π\}$. Our work establishes a versatile tool for probing topological characteristics and opens a new avenue for robust quantum computing architectures based on topological protection.

Superconducting qubits are often based on the first two energy levels of a physical anharmonic LC oscillator. Since the anharmonicity of such systems is usually much lower than the involved energy gaps, population can easily leak to higher energy states. This is what characterizes leakage errors, and it can have multiple sources: from coherent error induced by the control platform to incoherent thermal dissipation. In this work, we adapt an optimal control method based on sub-Riemannian geodesic search in the unitary group for a system consisting of two superconducting qubits with leakage levels. We use the $R_x(π/2)$ rotation for single-qubit operation analysis, and the $i$SWAP operation for two-qubit analysis. For the former, we find considerable performance improvement in average gate fidelity as well as in the reduction of leakage errors when comparing the obtained optimal pulses with Gaussian and DRAG pulses, especially for short duration pulses. For the $i$SWAP gate, although leakage error remains roughly the same, we manage to obtain considerably higher fidelities with the cost of requiring a slightly longer time evolution.

A gap between achievable rates and converse bounds persists for energy-constrained bosonic communication in the presence of excess noise. We derive a unified adaptive weak-converse bound for thermal attenuation, noisy amplification, and additive Gaussian noise under an unconditional mean transmitted-photon-number constraint. The bound applies to arbitrary adaptive protocols with quantum memories and constrains the two-way quantum, entanglement-distribution, private, and secret-key capacities. It vanishes throughout the entanglement-breaking region and approaches the corresponding PLOB bound at infinite energy. At finite energy, it improves the evaluated Gaussian squashed-entanglement and PLOB bounds in relevant parameter regimes, while comparison with hashing rates quantifies the remaining gap to achievability. The result provides a common energy-dependent benchmark for noisy bosonic Gaussian channels and extends finite-energy converse methods beyond the quantum-limited setting.

The Mpemba effect challenges the intuition that states closer to equilibrium must relax faster. We ask whether an analogous magic-ordering reversal can occur in the generation of quantum magic (nonstabilizerness), a key resource for universal quantum computation: can a state with less initial magic overtake one with more and reach its asymptotic value sooner? Here, we uncover interaction-induced dephasing as a distinct mechanism for this magic Mpemba effect, requiring neither transport nor conventional thermalization. For tilted product states in an interacting $\ell$-bit model, a random-phase analysis predicts a reversal of the magic ordering: states with less initial magic attain higher saturated magic, independent of their spatial pattern. Exact simulations of the $\ell$-bit model and localized spin chains further show that these states also saturate earlier. We observe both features on IBM superconducting quantum processors. An effective $\ell$-bit implementation accesses long dephasing times at fixed circuit depth by encoding time in gate angles, while a microscopic spin model exhibits the reversal universally across initial patterns in the localized regime but only selectively in the ergodic regime. These results establish interaction-induced dephasing as a route to anomalous quantum-resource relaxation beyond transport-driven thermalizing dynamics.

In recent work Phys. Rev. X 16, 031057 (2026), we proposed a self-consistent approach to entanglement certification based on generalized noncontextuality. It requires no prior characterization of the measurement devices and, given access to all local measurements, can certify every entangled state in a Bell circuit. Here, we study the complexity of this protocol in a finite experiment. At fixed local dimension $d$, we show that the optimal number of distinct local effects needed to reach a trace-distance \textit{entanglement resolution} $γ$ is $Θ_d(γ^{-(d-1)})$. This scaling is necessary even when the measurements are tailored to the target state. Independent Haar-random projective measurements instead require $Θ_d(γ^{-(d-1)}\log(1/γ))$ effects. Finally, we show that, once the exact operational identities are known, $Θ_d(γ^{-2}\log(1/δ))$ copies of the target state are necessary and sufficient for certification with error probability at most $δ$. Determining the optimal sample complexity when those identities must instead be inferred from the same finite target-state data remains open.

Characterizing the set of quantum nonlocal correlations through information-theoretic constraints is a central problem in quantum foundations. We show that the convex hull of no-signalling behaviors in a bipartite Bell experiment satisfying a common-overlap no-disturbance-without-uncertainty condition is exactly the finite-dimensional quantum set whenever one party has two binary measurements and the other has an arbitrary finite number of settings, each with an arbitrary finite number of outcomes. In the simplest binary input-output Bell scenario, this characterizes the full eight-dimensional set of quantum behaviors, including the local marginals. The proof constructs a quantum realization directly from the conditional probabilities and no-signalling. The characterization also reduces optimization of any linear Bell expression in these scenarios to maximization over a one-parameter family of second-order cone programs. The results establish a connection between local uncertainty-disturbance constraints and quantum nonlocality, mediated by no-signalling and shared classical randomness.

Physical many-body quantum systems typically interact locally, giving rise to ground states where entanglement grows with the area of the region being probed. Beyond entanglement, non-stabilizerness (or "magic") has been established as another crucial resource linked to quantum complexity and the properties of error-correcting states. Unlike entanglement, non-stabilizerness typically behaves with a volume-law scaling in ground states, indicating inherent computational complexity. In this work, we show that under a recent classification of quantum states, area-law states split into two distinct classes. Entanglement-dominated states obey an area-law for non-stabilizerness and admit efficient quantum algorithms for entanglement manipulation. Conversely, magic-dominated states exhibit a a faster-than-area growth of subsystem non-stabilizerness and require non-efficient algorithms for entanglement manipulation tasks. Within this context, we introduce the concept of the stabilizer regime, a restricted quantum phase that admits efficient entanglement manipulation and hosts area laws for both magic and entanglement.

We prove that unknown pure fermionic states prepared from disjoint-branch fixed-particle-number blocks can be reconstructed after general quadratic evolution, including pair creation and annihilation. For a fixed particle cap per block, adaptive or nonadaptive single-copy Gaussian measurements yield classical input and circuit descriptions with prescribed fidelity and confidence, using polynomial resources in system size and inverse infidelity. The adaptive procedure has the sharper copy guarantee. Connected quartic correlations and a covariance-compatible commutant identify the hidden blocks; local states are recovered from fresh measurements or a predetermined bounded-degree moment table. Stable branch recovery gives valid preparation descriptions. Neither particle-number conservation nor block homogeneity is required; no lower bound on branch weights or covariance gaps is assumed. A certified variant returns a passive preparation whenever one exists within the promised family, without advance membership information. On the full Gaussian orbit of paired magic states, quartic measurements alone suffice, with an explicit bound converting observable error into state error.

Polynomial transformations are basic primitives in quantum algorithms: quantum signal processing and singular value transformation compile univariate polynomials into circuits with query complexity essentially set by degree. Multivariable transformations of noncommuting matrices, however, lack a comparable synthesis theory. We develop a complete constructive theory under joint block access for all polynomials contractive on the prescribed matrix domain. Given a compact finite-state description of a degree-$D$ polynomial $P$ and $0<τ<1$, we synthesize $P$ with $(1+τ)$-optimal normalization using $O(D/\sqrtτ)$ queries, and exactly $D$ under row-block access, matching a degree lower bound. The complete circuit realization is classically computable in polynomial time with polylogarithmic dependence on accuracy. The key to our construction is a finite algorithmic Schur--Agler theorem: the coefficient recurrence defines a polynomial-dimensional continuation space supporting a complete semidefinite certificate for contractivity on the prescribed domain. Factoring this certificate yields the contractive realization underlying the query algorithm. Beyond matrix transformations, our framework lifts multivariable polynomial synthesis to quantum channel transformations. Given coherent Kraus access $K=\{K_a\}_a$, we synthesize any finite jointly contractive family of noncommutative polynomial maps $K\mapsto\{F_b(K)\}_b$ as completely positive operations, allowing coherent interference among Kraus histories. Furthermore, channel-level transformations specified by causal Choi data can be synthesized explicitly as fixed-order quantum combs. Collectively, these results point to a broader program: multivariable approximation as a language for multi-operator quantum algorithms and higher-order quantum information processing.

Entanglement sudden death (ESD), explored through a series of works by Yu and Eberly, supports the notion of entanglement vanishing abruptly and completely at a finite time, even when the underlying open-system dynamics remain smooth. In this article, we revisit the development of ESD from bipartite origins to genuine multipartite entanglement. We first illustrate the canonical mechanism of ESD with two independently damped qubits, for which the concurrence vanishes at a finite time while populations and coherences remain nonzero. We next present our results on multipartite entanglement for generalized GHZ states under depolarization. Global and independent local depolarizing dynamics can be chosen to produce identical reduced evolution for every individual qubit, yet they yield different genuine-multipartite-entanglement sudden death times, whose ordering can reverse with the initial state. For N-qubit GHZ states, this distinction becomes asymptotically stronger since the ESD time scales as 1/N under independent local depolarization, whereas under global depolarization it approaches a finite value in the thermodynamic limit. Echoing a central lesson of Prof. Eberly's work, we report the lifetime of multipartite entanglement is not fixed by the local dynamics, but rather depends on the evolution of the joint quantum state.

Recent advances in algorithms for simulating Lindblad dynamics have clarified their theoretical potential for state preparation, but their practicality in the early fault-tolerant regime and beyond remains uncertain. In this work, we address this by investigating the cost of preparing ground states of the fermionic Hubbard model, following the single-ancilla approach of [Phys. Rev. Research 6, 033147 (2024)]. We derive rigorous error bounds including constant prefactors, and compare to empirical error behavior and practical convergence parameters obtained from circuit-level simulations. We find that empirically chosen parameters can reduce the required resources by orders of magnitude, resulting in an estimated $7.7 \times 10^8$ T gates to perform one unit of time evolution targeting the low-energy subspace of a 36-site fermionic Hubbard model. We identify the accurate filtering of energy transitions as the main source of this cost.

Local-basis Shannon entropies of critical wave functions contain universal subleading information, but the Shannon point of the critical transverse-field Ising chain is singular in the conventional Rényi approach. We treat it directly at $n=1$ by representing the complete computational-basis Born distribution as the odd-degree boundary of independent long-range Bernoulli edges. The Shannon chain rule separates the entropy into explicit independent-edge and conditional cycle-space terms. For the periodic chain this isolates the analytic edge anomaly and organizes the remaining constant by linked vertex support. Conditional on the stated finite-part matching and forest assumptions, every nonvanishing linked coefficient is represented by an explicit finite-dimensional integral, giving an all-orders analytic hierarchy; the four-vertex term is evaluated in closed form, and the first few linked sectors already nearly saturate the established periodic constant, which is also reconstructed independently from the exact finite-size distribution. For an interval, the exterior reduces exactly to one ghost vertex and the explicit squared logarithms cancel, leaving the analytic edge contribution $γ_E=\log2/4-1/16$. The conditional cycle term has an exact all-support decomposition into physical-line and ghost-linked sectors; conditional on closure of the boundary forest subtraction, these sectors define an all-orders hierarchy of renormalized line and monomer--dimer boundary periods for the remaining logarithmic coefficient. The first complete augmented linked coefficient is evaluated in closed form, with an exact cancellation between its line and ghost boundary-layer anomalies; an independent reconstruction from exact finite-size probabilities recovers the established coefficient $γ_1=0.060020(3)$.

Superconducting circuits have emerged as one of the most promising and scalable platforms for quantum com- puting, with substantial industrial adoption driving qubit counts steadily upward. Yet the layout of the corresponding chips is still primarily performed manually, consuming multiple days or weeks of expert effort, even for moderately sized designs. Existing automation approaches sidestep this bottleneck by simplifying the underlying problem and relaxing physical constraints. Therefore, they fall short of fabrication-ready results. To overcome this scalability wall without such compromises, we first introduce a formal abstraction that translates physical device characteristics into a rigorous geometric problem formulation. This abstraction bridges physical realization and design automation. Building upon this abstraction, we then propose a three-stage design automation flow comprising geometry-aware global partitioning, ILP-based port assignment, and a hierarchical routing pipeline. Evaluations conducted by our interdisciplinary team of design au- tomation researchers and superconducting hardware experts con- firm that the resulting flow produces complete, manufacturing- ready layouts that comply with the physical design rules at the push of a button. That is, it operates fully automatically within seconds to a few minutes, and solves complex instances up to 25x faster than the state of the art. All methods are released as the fully open-source tool mqt-scpd as part of the Munich Quantum Toolkit, providing the first readily usable, end- to-end design flow for planar superconducting quantum chips that explicitly addresses the underlying physical characteristics and requirements.

Whether the spin-1/2 Aharonov-Bohm Hamiltonian supports bound states has remained controversial since Hagen concluded that no such states exist for a Dirac particle. Here, we show that Hagen's solution corresponds to a particular member of the one-parameter family of self-adjoint extensions that describe the singular Zeeman interaction, and we identify which member the microscopic physics selects. Matching the extension parameter to a finite-radius flux tube yields $ν=0$ precisely at $g=2$, and it does so in every flux sector. The critical $g$ factor is therefore universal, $g_c=2$, and depends on neither the flux sector nor the regularization radius. The flux sector controls the depth of the bound state energy, and we obtain a closed-form expression showing that binding deepens markedly with the integer part of the flux. Hagen's conclusion is thus confirmed and sharpened: it is not a statement about one arbitrary member of a family of extensions, but about the member that the physics selects when the magnetic moment takes its Dirac value, and an anomalous moment is a necessary and sufficient condition for binding in the singular channel.

We determine the least Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) extractability compatible with a Mermin-Ardehali-Belinskii-Klyshko (MABK) Bell score for every number of parties greater than two. Extractability is the largest squared overlap with a GHZ state obtainable by separate local quantum channels. Between the biseparable bound and the quantum maximum, the exact minimum is the affine interpolation from one half to one. The bound holds for normal states on tensor products of arbitrary local dimension and arbitrary binary measurements. We settle the previously unresolved range of six or more parties with an analytic proof that is uniform from four parties onward. We also determine the exact minimum when every local system is a qubit, and show that it lies strictly above the unrestricted bound at every interior score. One qutrit and qubits at all remaining parties attain every point of the bound with measurements fixed as the score varies. For at least four parties and strict interior scores, we classify all states attaining the bound with the minimum product of local support dimensions. For at least four parties on one qutrit and qubits elsewhere, we also prove that, when the extractability excess above the affine minimum is small, the trace-norm distance from the attaining mixture, up to local unitaries, is bounded by a constant times the square root of that excess. The exponent $1/2$ is optimal, and the constants are independent of the number of parties on every fixed interior interval of normalized scores.

Gaussian steering sets a sharp threshold for creating Wigner negativity at a distance. A measurement by Bob can make Alice's part of a shared Gaussian state Wigner negative only if Alice can steer him with Gaussian measurements. We ask whether multiple copies, ancillas, or catalysts can lift this requirement when Alice is restricted to Gaussian operations. We introduce the steered negativity, a multiplicative monotone whose logarithm equals the Gaussian steerability for Gaussian states. It bounds the negativity that Bob can herald and rules out activation by copies, by ancillas of Bob, and by catalysts without remote negativity of their own. For a strictly unsteerable Gaussian state and a single round of feed-forward to a Gaussian unitary of Alice, we further prove that even a Wigner-negative or steerable catalyst cannot help if it is returned exactly. Gaussian steering thus remains a barrier to remote Wigner negativity beyond the single-copy setting.

Clustering is a fundamental task in unsupervised learning. The goal is to partition unlabeled data into clusters such that similar elements are assigned to the same cluster, while elements in different clusters are dissimilar. We propose a quantum Monte Carlo approach to density estimation, a key routine in density peak clustering. Building on this approach, we develop quantum algorithms for the full clustering problem and three related tasks: decision clustering, cluster counting, and heavy cluster counting. For each one, we establish a polynomial quantum query speedup under assumptions on the scaling of dataset-dependent parameters. Numerical experiments suggest that these conditions are satisfied for several practically relevant settings.

Quantum memories are key ingredients for future quantum networks. Developing methods for their certification is therefore an important, yet challenging, problem. In this work, we present a general framework for certifying quantum memories and quantifying their performance in an operational and efficient manner, taking advantage of developments in the theory of quantum channels. We start by giving a pedagogical introduction to these concepts and tools and illustrate their natural application to quantum memories. Specifically, we quantify the fidelity of a quantum memory via the notion of average channel fidelity, which can be estimated precisely in an experiment via a finite set of probe states forming a so-called $2$-design. We then present a number of witnessing techniques for certifying this quantity, and show that it gives access to other important properties of the channel, such as its dimensionality and its capacity to transmit quantum information. We consider mostly a simple prepare-and-measure scenario, but discuss also the case of an entanglement-based setup, as well as a semi-device-independent approach. Finally, we apply these methods to a solid-state quantum memory experiment, certifying an average channel fidelity of 98.6%. Our certification methods can be readily applied to other quantum devices, such as fibers, transducers and gates.

We investigate how post-selected von Neumann measurements modify the nonclassical properties of two-mode entangled coherent states (ECSs). From the conditional pointer state, we characterize squeezing, photon statistics, intermode correlations, entanglement, fidelity, and post-selection probability. Anomalous weak values with moderate coupling enhance squeezing, antibunching, sub-Poissonian statistics, intermode correlations, and bipartite entanglement, while fidelity captures the crossover from weak perturbation to strong distinguishability. These results demonstrate post-selection as a tunable approach to engineering ECSs.

We propose an unified view to three well known quadratic Hamiltonians widely considered in quantum mechanics, i.e. those of the harmonic oscillator, of the inverted harmonic oscillator, and the Berry-Keating Hamiltonian. We describe an unified approach to determine the discrete spectrum of these operators, and to deduce their (generalized) eigenstates. We also look at these Hamiltonians as the generators of $\mathfrak{su}(1,1)$, and of a generalized version of it relevant in presence of non Hermitian generators.

We report a 3D-printed microwave-resonator Paul trap that operates at the GHz frequencies required for electron confinement while preserving an open geometry suitable for laser access and imaging ion Coulomb crystals. The resonator exhibits moderate quality factors of approximately 1000, enabling large confining electric-field amplitudes at low input power, and is in good agreement with finite-element-method (FEM) predictions despite manufacturing imperfections, which we experimentally characterize. The validated FEM model is then used to calculate the electromagnetic fields in the trapping region. These field distributions, together with surface-roughness measurements, are incorporated into a model of electron spin-qubit decoherence to estimate the coherence time. Our analysis predicts that electron spin-qubit coherence times on the order of 10 ms should be achievable under the assumption that motional heating is dominated by Johnson noise, making such systems relevant for quantum information processing. The method of obtaining the coherence time is applicable to any electron Paul trap.

We develop a computational framework for the quantum relative entropy based on the replica trick and apply it to analyze the evaporation process method of Jackiw-Teitelboim black holes. We show that the relative entropies between the exact radiation state and the Hawking saddle state and the replica wormholes saddle state quantify information-theoretic costs inherent to coarse-grained semiclassical descriptions. During evaporation, the relative entropy for the Hawking saddle increases monotonically, reflecting a progressively higher thermodynamic cost of sustaining the Hawking description. Conversely, the relative entropy associated with the replica wormholes saddle decreases, which indicates that the description of connected geometries becomes progressively more accurate. Moreover, the sign of the difference between the two quantities reverses precisely at the Page time, providing an information-theoretic diagnosis for the transition between competing gravitational saddles. Our results recast the Page transition as a flow of relative entropy costs between competing semi-classical descriptions, revealing an information-theoretic structure underlying the emergence of effective irreversibility in coarse-grained black hole evaporation.

Space-Time Wave Packets (STWPs) have enabled numerous nontrivial properties, such as tunable group velocities, nondiffraction and nonlocal spin textures in optical fields. However, this has not been properly studied in matter waves. Here, we investigate free-electron STWPs, which are propagation-invariant and group-velocity-tunable matter wave packets, constructed by constraining the spatiotemporal spectrum of the electron wavefunction in momentum space. Due to the unique dispersion of free-electrons, the electron STWP can carry two different topologies, and host both meron and skyrmion topological textures in momentum space. We demonstrate the topological phase transitions and tunable skyrmion numbers by spectral geometry tuning. We also show the topologically robust propagation of the electron pulses and corresponding real-space skyrmionic expectation value textures encoded within each single electron wavefunction. Our results open a platform for topological free-electron wavepackets uses in sensing and information transfer.

For perfect state transfer (PST) on unweighted mixed graphs, we classify the normalized transfer times of complete PST classes. A finite set $Λ\subset\mathbb R/\mathbb Z$ containing zero occurs at a nonstationary periodic vertex if and only if $\cos(2π(x-y))\in\mathbb Q$ for all $x,y\inΛ$. Every admissible set has a connected oriented realization. We also classify the possible return phases of oriented realizations at the minimum vertex period. Transfers at rational multiples of the common minimum vertex period partition a complete class into sets of size at most six, or at most three in an oriented graph with return phase $-1$; both bounds are sharp. We construct complete classes of every finite size, including classes in which all transfers between distinct vertices occur at irrational multiples of the period and no switching automorphism maps a class vertex to a distinct class vertex. We also characterize simultaneous realization in connected oriented graphs with prescribed relative minimum vertex periods and return phases. The proof combines an imaginary quadratic field restriction with an unweighted construction that selects the complete target set.

We study the interplay between symmetry defects insertion and the phenomena of quantum many body scarring. We exploit a class of models obtained from an embedding mechanism that defines a stochastic matrix form hamiltonian, hosting zero energy many body scarred states. Such models display an interesting playground to explore the consequences of dualities, half-gauging operations and so on. We first show that inside this class of models, what are the conditions to still have scared states after defect insertion. The main result of our work is a detailed analysis of half-gauging in such chains, which introduces a non-trivial interface in our system, leading to scarred states protected by the underlying symmetries. The conclusions for half-gauged scarred systems are general and may lead to fruitful directions for higher dimension scarred physics and their robustness.

Pauli decomposition underpins Trotterization, phase estimation, sparse-Hamiltonian simulation, and variational observables, at exponential naive cost. From the character theory of $(\mathbb{Z}_2)^n$, characters $χ_z(v)=(-1)^{\langle v,z\rangle}$ are the diagonal Pauli strings, so any diagonal operator is already Pauli-decomposed. A general operator still needs the shifts: each $X^{\otimes x}$ couples to a character $χ_z=Z^{\otimes z}$, and the products $X^{\otimes x}Z^{\otimes z}$ -- up to phases in $\{\pm 1,\pm i\}$ -- form the Pauli group, the central extension of $(\mathbb{Z}_2)^n\times(\mathbb{Z}_2)^n$ by that phase group fixed by the symplectic pairing. A section of that extension remains a choice: the bare products $X^{\otimes x}Z^{\otimes z}$, or the genuine operators that insert $Y=iXZ$ at every qubit where $x$ and $z$ overlap. As Fourier analysis on an abelian shift-character lattice (a natural DFT), this formulation is not qubit-bound: $(\mathbb{Z}_p)^n$ recovers Heisenberg-Weyl qudits. The fast algorithm is the FFT for the group at hand; on $(\mathbb{Z}_2)^n$ that FFT is Walsh-Hadamard, at cost $O(n\cdot 4^n)$. paulikit is a memory-bounded realization of that qubit transform: peak usage need not materialize the dense $2^n\times 2^n$ operator, unlike prior codes whose $O(1)$ extra sits on that buffer, checked beyond a billion oscillator terms against Work-Span and bandwidth ceilings.

We proposed to boost the photon bunching effect of classical light via a modified Fabry-Pérot cavity with one of the cavity mirrors being replaced by a spatial light modulator, through which multiple independent transverse modulations, each was to encode independently spatially correlated phase on the wave front of the light field, was cascaded in sequence in the longitudinal propagation direction in the cavity. The two-photon bunching peak and the three-photon bunching peak of the generated superbunching light field were measured to be $36.9\pm2.0$ and $\rm (2.46\pm0.12)\times10^{3}$, respectively, which, as compared to those of thermal light, were improved by one-order and three-order of magnitude, respectively. Correspondingly, the ghost image visibility reconstructed with the superbunching light was demonstrated experimentally to be improved by $\sim 40$ times as compared to that with the pseudo-thermal light. Such classical superbunching light field is of essential importance not only for fundamental physics but also for potential applications such as correlated imaging, ghost interference and nonlinear optics.

Non-classical dynamics in open quantum systems can be hidden in temporal correlations that are invisible to standard state- and channel-based tests. We define coherence for multi-time quantum processes and show that access to intermediate times can reveal coherence absent from all corresponding pairwise channels. Incoherent processes are fixed points of dephasing on all input and output spaces, and their coherence is quantified by relative entropy. As a proof of principle, we use an Ising model in which all three pairwise channels are incoherent while the full three-time process remains coherent. We observe this multi-time coherence on a superconducting quantum processor using a coherence witness and full process tomography.

We introduce an inertial counterdiabatic (CD) protocol that reformulates shortcut-to-adiabaticity design as a moving-frame diagonalization problem. The method employs the Magnus expansion to construct a variational propagator generated by an accessible CD ansatz. In the new rotating frame, the controls are optimized to suppress the off-diagonal Hamiltonian terms, and the CD terms are defined to counteract the corresponding inertial contribution. The propagator generated with the Magnus expansion naturally exploits additional control directions generated through its nested commutator, while the sequential design of the propagator introduces temporal nonlocality into the optimization. We benchmark the method on a two-qubit system and on the one-dimensional quantum Ising chain, where it consistently outperforms variational CD protocols based on action minimization. The largest improvements are observed near gap-closing regions, demonstrating the advantage of combining temporal and algebraic nonlocality for suppressing diabatic excitations.

Conventional compressed sensing (CS) has a measurement lower bound of M = Ω(K log(N/K)) under non-adaptive measurements. Recent experiments on quantum compressed sensing (QCS) have reported numbers of measurements below this classical lower bound. In this work, we establish lower bounds on the measurement complexity of QCS from an information-theoretic and quantum-physical perspective. QCS exploits quantum parallelism, enabling a unitary domain-alignment evolution to act on a superposition of all N basis states and map the sparse basis onto the measurement basis in a one-to-one manner. Consequently, the locations of nonzero components are explicitly carried by measurement-index labels. If only basic statistical information about the K nonzero components is required, the total number of effective index samples satisfies the coarse necessary condition Ms = Ω(K). Under independent single-index projective measurements, when the support is unknown, the nonzero probabilities satisfy pn = Θ(1/K), and exact support recovery is required with a fixed success probability, the sampling-coverage requirement leads to Ms = Θ(K ln K). If each nonzero amplitude coefficient is further required to achieve a coordinate-wise relative root-mean-square error ε, the optimal effective index sample complexity is Ms = Θ(K ln K + K/ε2), which reduces to Θ(K ln K) for fixed ε. Multimode photon-number-resolving detection can reduce the number of experimental rounds but not the total effective index sample complexity. These results show that quantum parallelism is not only a core resource for quantum computing but can also play a transformative role in measurement science.

Quantum automated learning (QAL) trains quantum models by directly updating quantum states, offering an approach to quantum machine learning that avoids optimizing variational circuit parameters. However, post-selection constrains the probability of obtaining the final learned model. We develop a post-selection-free QAL algorithm that organizes a complete training path into a coherent quantum circuit and uses fixed-point amplitude amplification to increase the probability of obtaining the learned model. We provide theoretical guarantees on output error and learning loss, and identify conditions under which additional coherent resources reduce the cost of restarting failed trajectories. The construction gives QAL a coherent implementation with explicit learning guarantees and resource costs, enabling a model with certified learning quality and controlled output error to be obtained with high probability.

Multimodal vision-language systems typically fuse image and text embeddings through classical operators such as concatenation, attention, bilinear pooling, or tensor interactions. We propose Quantum Entangled Multimodal Fusion Networks (QEMFN), a hybrid quantum-classical framework that introduces parameterized entanglement as a structured inductive bias for multimodal fusion. Pretrained visual and textual features are projected into compact latent spaces, encoded as angle-parameterized quantum states, processed through intra-modal and paired cross-modal entangling circuits, and measured to produce fused representations for retrieval. Under matched parameter budgets and identical frozen CLIP backbones, QEMFN outperforms classical fusion baselines on COCO-5k and Flickr30k, including multilayer perceptron, tensor fusion, FiLM, cross-attention, compact transformer, and a dequantized paired-topology analogue. An ablation suite isolates the quantum module's contribution from the surrounding classical projections, and quantum-centric analyses report Meyer-Wallach entangling capability, expressibility, gradient variance against barren-plateau bounds, and entropy-performance correlation under controls for training progress alongside an intervention study on the entangling component. QEMFN is executed under shot-based estimation, a noise-modeled fake backend, and a real superconducting device with zero-noise extrapolation. This work does not claim quantum computational advantage; the contribution is the framework together with a controlled empirical and quantum-centric evaluation that positions trainable entanglement as an interpretable, hardware-executable fusion mechanism at scales accessible on contemporary devices.

A client who rents a cloud quantum processor cannot easily tell whether the bitstrings it receives came from a quantum device. Certification by random circuit sampling runs on present hardware, but scoring each returned sample costs the client time $O(2^n)$. We give a protocol in which the client scores each round in time $O(n)$, built on degenerate concordant ensembles. When a concordant state has a degenerate spectrum, every concordance-preserving gate factorizes as $G_t=U_tP_tB_tU_{t-1}^\dagger$, and the block factor $B_t$, which commutes with the state, cancels from the ensemble while entangling each pure component. The client holds a secret parity whose cosets are the degenerate sectors of every layer, so that it builds the circuit and predicts the ensemble with one inner product per layer. The secret never leaves the client. Inputs are sent uniformly at random, and the client attaches to each round, in its own bookkeeping, the eigenvalue of that input in the hidden state; both verification statistics, an input--output agreement test and a weighted collision test, then compare the server's samples with the non-flat output distribution of the concordant computation. We prove completeness, client efficiency, and soundness in an ideal model in which the compiled circuit reveals nothing about the secret, and we show that the secret must stay hidden: a classical server that holds it passes. For the explicit construction we prove that the single-qubit symmetry test used in efficient simulations of concordant computation fails on non-product inputs with unbiased marginals, and we measure that the local-basis finder of Cable and Browne halts on every layer we tested, that the transmitted component saturates the maximal Schmidt rank, that the circuit is not Clifford, and that matrix-product spoofers are rejected. Soundness of the explicit construction is stated as a conjecture.

We derive the density matrix of a nonstationary system in the adiabatic representation and obtain the corresponding Liouville equation. This representation is particularly suitable when the standard interaction representation is inapplicable. We illustrate the approach with two identical, spatially separated spin-1/2 particles coupled by a magnetic dipole-dipole interaction in a slowly varying external magnetic field. Specifically, we analyze the spin polarization of pseudo-qutrit states in regimes where the states become entangled. The application of the adiabatic representation to calculate the dependence of observed physical quantities on time for quantum systems is illustrated. Our results show that entangled states can significantly modify the behavior of these observables and provide additional opportunities for their control.

In this paper, we introduce the concept of quasi non-signaling in time (QNSIT), which extends non-signaling in time (NSIT) to quasiprobability distributions. QNSIT requires that the marginals of the quasiprobability distribution under consideration at intermediate times remain unperturbed by the measurement back-action induced by a sequence of quantum measurements. Associated with QNSIT, we propose a quasiprobabilistic characterization of macrorealism, ${\rm MR}_{\rm qp}$, which requires that both the QNSIT conditions are satisfied and the quasiprobability distribution constructed from the measurement outcomes is positive. We prove that ${\rm MR}_{\rm qp}$ implies NSIT, whereas the converse does not hold because of hidden superposition paths generated or preserved by the system dynamics. We also prove that, for a two-level system, the ${\rm MR}_{\rm qp}$ and NSIT conditions coincide. ${\rm MR}_{\rm qp}$ therefore provides a more sensitive tool for testing macrorealism and can be implemented experimentally through a quantum non-demolition measurement scheme.

A central goal in quantum information science is understanding which physical states can be converted into others. The ideal scenario would be a totally ordered system, where every state can be ranked by a single value, and a higher-ranked state can always be converted into a lower-ranked one. Such an ordering would provide a complete description of state convertibility, making the resource structure maximally simple to characterize and compare. We prove that such a simple ordering is fundamentally impossible for any quantum system with dimension larger than 2. The underlying properties of quantum mechanics guarantee that some states will always be incomparable. Furthermore, we show this is a uniquely quantum phenomenon by constructing classical systems of any size that can be perfectly ranked. This establishes a rigorous and striking divide between quantum and classical state transformations.

A spin one-half driven only by total-spin operators generates a renewal process in which one interevent time $n^\ast$ is forbidden while all others occur. No classical hidden Markov model reproduces it with fewer than $1+\sqrt{n^\ast}$ states, an unbounded separation whose only resource is one relative phase of $π$. With $K$ amplitudes the same interference yields $K(K{+}1)/2$ decay channels, and for positive weights and generic rates the classical cost is exactly $K(K{+}1)/2$ states. Both are realized by a depth-three circuit whose parameter count does not grow with the register.

We demonstrate a compact, practical all-fiber source of non-degenerate telecom-band polarization-entangled photon pairs assembled from off-the-shelf components. The compact fiber-integrated architecture is designed to be affordable, straightforward to assemble and align, and compatible with existing optical-fiber infrastructure. Photon pairs are generated through type-0 spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a pigtailed periodically poled lithium-niobate waveguide embedded in a Sagnac interferometer. At 0.5 mW pump power, quantum-state tomography yields a Bell-state fidelity $F_{Φ^-}=0.850$, purity $P=0.836$, and concurrence $C=0.782$. A separate CHSH measurement gives $S=2.3301\pm0.0075$. The measured Bell-state fidelity is sufficient for the reconstructed polarization state to support qubit teleportation above the classical fidelity limit under ideal protocol operations. Analysis of the density matrix shows that approximately 96.7% of the population remains in the desired $|HH\rangle$-$|VV\rangle$ subspace, with a normalized coherence of approximately 0.86. A residual relative-phase offset indicates that local phase compensation could increase the Bell-state fidelity to approximately 0.8865. We further characterize the brightness--quality trade-off and obtain a corrected pair-rate slope of $(0.918\pm0.040)$ Mcps mW$^{-1}$. The broadband emission and fiber interfaces offer a route to multiuser entanglement distribution through off-the-shelf multichannel wavelength-division multiplexers with passbands matched to the signal and idler wavelengths.

We study cyclic triorthogonal codes in prime dimension $p$, on which a transversal third-level diagonal gate acts as a logical non-Clifford gate. For odd $p$, we use a definition of triorthogonality that does not require self-orthogonality. For cyclic codes of length coprime to $p$, triorthogonality reduces to a sumset condition on the spectral support, which makes exhaustive search feasible: for two natural constructions, we enumerate all maximal codes of this kind for $p=3$ up to length $121$ and $p=5,7$ up to length $96$. For qubits, we prove that a cyclic code of odd length is triply even if and only if it is classically triorthogonal, giving a complete description of triply-even cyclic codes, and we determine all such codes up to length $763$. For qudits, we find codes such as $[[19,1,3]]_3$ and $[[7,1,3]]_7$, which improve on the shortest Reed-Muller and Reed-Solomon codes in both overhead exponent and distillation threshold. The latter is the first member of an infinite family of $[[p,1,2\lfloor p/6\rfloor+1]]_p$ codes.

The possibility of generating light in a squeezed quantum state during saturated light amplification in a semiconductor amplifier is theoretically analyzed. Due to four-wave mixing process during amplification, weak components of the spontaneous emission of the medium with symmetric frequency shifts relative to the strong amplified wave acquire the quantum properties of two-mode squeezed light. The squeezing of quadrature components occurs in the range of frequency shifts of several GHz ($\sim$ the inverse relaxation time of the charge carrier density) and can reach 10 dB or more under optimal conditions. The formation of a two-mode squeezing phase facilitates the observation of the squeezing effect, in which a strong wave, playing the role of a local wave, exhibits quadrature noise suppression without additional homodyne detection.

A local measurement of a critical many-body state produces exponentially many microscopic outcomes, each defining a different conditioned quantum state. We ask how much information from one such outcome is actually needed to predict the entanglement that remains between two unmeasured regions. We show that, in critical quantum chains, the universal outcome-resolved Rényi entropy is asymptotically determined by a single compact conformal coordinate extracted directly from the measurement record. Compact-boson theory explains this compression: the universal entropy is insensitive to all spatially varying components of the boundary profile, retaining only a single relative compact zero mode. At the free-fermion XX point, exact lattice identities expose the microscopic structure underlying the decoder, while large-scale outcome-by-outcome calculations confirm its scaling prediction across different subsystem geometries and Rényi indices. Numerical calculations in interacting XXZ chains further show that the same microscopic coordinate continues to decode the conditional entropy without interaction-dependent retuning. Thus an exponentially large space of measurement outcomes is reduced, for this universal observable, to a single conformal degree of freedom, revealing an emergent Luttinger-liquid mechanism for outcome-resolved postmeasurement entanglement.

First-generation quantum repeaters are essential in distributing entanglement over long distances since they could mitigate losses in optical fiber. Repeaters split the total distance into shorter, easier to generate links. Then, entanglement swapping establishes long range entanglement by performing local measurements at the repeaters and heralding their results. In this work, we develop an analytical model that estimates the impact of decoherence during heralding for a given protocol. Furthermore, we identify a competition between two phenomena: as repeater count increases, so does entanglement generation, but the additive impact of memory decoherence on final entanglement rate increases too. Therefore, we find that an optimal number of repeaters exists. These findings could lead the design of future quantum networks, both in the inter-repeater distance and swapping timings.

We study divisibility of finite-dimensional quantum dynamics in the Heisenberg picture when the dynamical maps need not be invertible. Heisenberg divisible dynamics determines unique reduced propagators on the accessible operator systems, and Heisenberg CP-divisibility is shown to be equivalent to an operator-norm monotonicity. Although each reduced propagator admits a unital completely positive extension, independently chosen extensions need not satisfy a composition law. Generalized inverses restore this law algebraically, but do not, in general, preserve complete positivity. We characterize the resulting obstruction and give a sufficient construction based on unital completely positive projections onto the accessible operator systems. It is shown that for qubit dynamics Heisenberg CP-divisibility always guarantees a completely positive generalized-inverse propagator. Finally, we analyze time-local generators at singular times and identify the associated gauge freedom on dynamically inaccessible directions.

How a mobile impurity exchanges momentum and energy with a many-body environment is a central question in nonequilibrium quantum physics. This exchange becomes particularly complex when the impurity moves rapidly and is strongly coupled to its bath. Here, we realize an interaction-tunable cold-atom collider with fermionic $^{40}$K impurities immersed in a $^{23}$Na Bose--Einstein condensate. A species-selective Raman pulse simultaneously launches the condensate and quenches the interspecies scattering length, producing an initial relative speed 36 times the condensate speed of sound. We track the ensuing relative motion as the interspecies interaction is tuned from weak coupling to resonance. At weak and intermediate coupling, the impurity dynamics are well described by a finite-energy two-body collision model. Near resonance, however, the early-time impurity acceleration is markedly suppressed relative to the two-body prediction, corresponding to a strong enhancement of the apparent dynamical inertia. The enhancement is observed near two distinct Feshbach resonances. These observations provide evidence for a polaronic response in the strongly coupled, supersonic regime of a degenerate Bose--Fermi mixture.

Black holes are usually described either as classical geometries on which quantum fields propagate or as objects whose complete quantum description lies beyond semiclassical gravity. Hawking radiation already shows, however, that a black hole is not an exactly isolated system: the horizon carries a thermal scale and, after coarse graining, may be associated with fluctuations, dissipation and environmental correlations. Whether this horizon-scale openness can be encoded directly in the gravitational background, before any stochastic treatment of the metric, remains an open question. Here we answer it by introducing, for the first time, a conserved Hawking-scale anisotropic source representing the coarse-grained near-horizon atmosphere and solving the Einstein equations for a static black hole at fixed ADM mass. The dressed geometry has a renormalized mass function, a self-consistently shifted horizon and a modified surface gravity. Because the same lapse governs the horizon and timelike geodesics, the thermal response is accompanied by a correlated orbital restructuring: the effective potential is renormalized, the ISCO moves inward and the near-horizon residence time increases. The construction adds no Langevin force to a fixed Schwarzschild background; rather, it defines a deterministic dressed mean geometry, providing a controlled background on which stochastic metric fluctuations may subsequently be treated in the Einstein-Langevin framework. This establishes the deterministic mean-field sector as the necessary first step for future stochastic gravity programs addressing horizon-scale openness.

We study how a parity--time-symmetric photonic environment changes the charging of Dicke and Tavis--Cummings quantum batteries. For atoms prepared in the collective ground state the excitation number grows as the square of the charging time, with a coefficient set by the initial mean photon number; the counter-rotating terms of the Dicke model add one to four times that number. Conservation of the total excitation number turns this into an exact ceiling on the stored Tavis--Cummings energy, the transition energy times the smaller of the photon and atom numbers, met numerically to within two per cent, which the Dicke terms overshoot by a few per cent at ultrastrong coupling. We then couple a battery to a lossy--gain pair, keeping the parity--time symmetry intact by putting an identical battery in each cavity; the closed moment system puts the exceptional point at the loss rate. Below it the gain cavity fills and the gain-side battery charges while the lossy-side one stays empty; above it photons are shuttled away and dissipated. Solving the full Lindblad equation with batched Monte--Carlo wave functions, we find that the gain-side battery gains thirty-nine, twenty-six and twenty-eight per cent in stored energy, power and ergotropy in the broken phase and loses sixty-five, thirty-five and sixty-five per cent deep in the unbroken phase, where the lossy-side battery overtakes it. Restoring the counter-rotating terms leaves all of this unchanged within the statistical error; what they add is a reactive oscillation at twice the transition frequency that does no net work but nearly doubles the peak of the instantaneous power. The extra energy is of lower quality, the recoverable fraction dropping from about ninety-eight to ninety per cent. The optimum sits on the broken side, close to but not at the exceptional point.

A ruler reads an unknown length against a calibrated scale. The quantum data ruler reads a matrix element of an unknown state against the signal of a known reference, from their ratio. It is exact for any Hamiltonian and any time, since transition operators change by a state-dependent constant times one function of time, removing the vanishing-signal limit. The readout is unbiased under dephasing and amplitude damping, and recovers the coherent ergotropy of a quantum battery that two-point measurement erases. The structure survives the classical limit as action--angle Fourier modes.

Quantum telescopy, proposed by Grottesman et al., uses spatially entangled single-photon states to modify HBT stellar interferometry, potentially surpassing Michelson interferometry in resolution without baseline limits. However, finite source bandwidth, non-unit efficiency, detector response times, and celestial light bandwidth all affect its effectiveness. In this work, we consider a spatially entangled singe-photon state generated by beam-splitting a practical anti-bunched photon source from resonance fluorescence, which is a common method of generating single-photon states, and evaluate the signal level in quantum telescopy with inclusion of imperfection of detection system and finite bandwidth of celestial light. Here, given the incoming light, we optimize the parameters of the anti-bunched photon source and the detector system for the best signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which can match that of the Michelson method in the ideal case but is always smaller in the realistic case. Alternatively, weak coherent states from heavily attenuated lasers can replace the entangled single-photon state but suffer low signal level, similar to HBT method. We find that the SNR with a realistic anti-bunched source for producing the reference fields can still beat the SNR of the coherent state scheme in the weak incoming field limit. The optimized parameters for the anti-bunched source and detection system will be a guide for future experimental endeavor.

We show that Hawking radiation spontaneously generated by dynamical black-hole formation can be realized in a local quantum spin model. Starting from the ground state corresponding to the early-time vacuum, with no initially prepared excitations, we follow the dynamics induced by the evolving geometry. In the corresponding continuum quantum field theory, Hawking particle creation is associated with nontrivial Bogoliubov mixing between the in- and out-mode decompositions. We derive the resulting renormalized local energy density in the continuum quantum field theory, which corresponds to an energy-weighted integral of the Hawking spectrum, and identify its counterpart as a local spin observable whose expectation value quantitatively reproduces the continuum prediction, including its dependence on the surface gravity. The agreement persists over a finite time window whose duration grows logarithmically with system size, revealing the crossover from universal continuum Hawking physics to lattice-cutoff dynamics. These results establish a microscopic route to quantum simulation of quantum field theory in curved spacetime, connecting field-theoretic particle creation directly to experimentally accessible many-body observables.

The eigenstate quantum-mechanical bootstrap can converge to the physical moment set while remaining nonexact at every finite order. We prove this for a one-dimensional quasi-exactly solvable sextic oscillator at explicitly known eigenvalues, including excited levels. At every finite order, the lower and upper bounds on $u^2$ remain strictly below and above its physical value, even after adjoining arbitrary finite polynomial Gram tests and all eigenstate-annihilator relations visible in the retained moment space. Hence neither side of the centered observable admits a finite sum-of-squares certificate modulo the eigenstate annihilator. The gap persists under any finite set of additional localizing constraints whose weights are strictly positive on polynomial vectors. We then prove convergence for polynomial Schrödinger operators satisfying explicit sum-of-squares confinement and derivative bounds. The eigenstate relations give moment estimates uniform in the truncation order; these yield a regular Schrödinger representation supported on the prescribed eigenspace. Finally, a four-mode extension combines this fixed-observable obstruction with feasible position moments having no positive representing measure at every finite order. At level three, this construction yields nonphysical feasible points with strictly positive definite moment matrices.

Fragment molecular orbital (FMO) quantum chemistry offers a natural route to parallel quantum computing: large molecular calculations can be decomposed into smaller quantum subproblems that can, in principle, run concurrently. Their practical benefit on real quantum hardware, however, has remained unclear. We demonstrate parallel FMO calculations on three room-temperature diamond-based 'Quoll' quantum computers installed on-site at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. Helium clusters (He$_{n}$, $n=2,4,8,10,14$) served as a testbed for total energy calculations using the Quantum Wave Function Sampler (QWFS), a selected configuration interaction (SCI) approach. We compare two execution modes: synchronous shot-parallel execution, in which quantum processors jointly sample QWFS circuits and combine their SPAM-corrected counts into a single probability distribution; and asynchronous fragment-parallel execution, in which processors independently evaluate FMO fragments using device-specific optimized circuits. Both modes increase quantum sampling throughput without systematic loss of accuracy. The three-QPU shot-parallel workflow reaches a parallel efficiency of $93.60\%$, while the fragment-parallel workflow achieves a measured efficiency of $75.01\%$, increasing to $95.17\%$ when excluding the non-useful idle time associated with non-interruptible submitted jobs. In both cases, the assembled FMO-QWFS energies remain chemically accurate compared to the classical ideal. These results provide a proof-of-concept demonstration that parallel quantum execution can improve the practical throughput of quantum chemistry workflows on prototype hardware, motivating the development of future HPC environments with many fault-tolerant quantum processors operating as a distributed resource for molecular and materials simulation.

Finding useful variational quantum circuits requires more than representational capacity: training must also have access to directions that improve the objective. We study how discrete CNOT routing shapes both capacity and local accessibility. For circuits built from CNOT and arbitrary one-qubit gates, we separate binary routing matrices from continuous rotations to relate global capacity to local tangent accessibility. An exact finite-field formula for the operator Schmidt rank of a CNOT block and cumulative multiblock bounds yield capacity constraints and a Bell-pair fidelity obstruction. Locally, routing propagates generators into a routing-dependent tangent space, so all parameter gradients can vanish even when the ambient objective gradient is nonzero; frame bounds distinguish loss of gradient coverage from poor conditioning. A routing-conditioned identity insertion preserves the current unitary, state, loss, and existing gradients while adding new tangent directions. Candidate-only and incremental projection scores provide local criteria for ranking insertions. Exact-statevector tests show strong short-horizon score-descent correlations on controlled Bell tasks and effective equal-cost selection on connected Heisenberg chains up to twelve qubits, with complementary TFIM selector controls. A broader TFIM routing ensemble exhibits routing-dependent near-stagnation. Together, these results connect representational capacity, local accessibility, and same-point repair through a common discrete routing description. An architecture need not remain fixed during training: task-dependent geometric information can guide the opening of new descent directions while preserving the learned circuit at insertion. This provides a concrete local approach to a broader problem: how useful quantum circuits can be discovered from the information a task supplies.

Quantum batteries store energy in nonequilibrium quantum states. The ergotropy sets the work extractable by an arbitrary global unitary, but a device usually exchanges energy through a single local port. It remains unclear how much stored work such a port can deliver, and whether topological edge modes help. We study a dimerized spin chain of Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) type. Excited two-level ancillas charge it at one end by repeated collisions, and an initially empty two-level load discharges it at the same site. An exact free-fermion mapping yields a bound on the load work for all number-conserving quadratic extraction protocols. The load gains extractable work only if a single-particle mode of the battery holds more than half an excitation. Resonant charging fills the topological edge mode above this threshold. A single boundary pulse then delivers 98.6% of the maximal load work allowed by the bound for representative parameters. Under the same six-collision controls, the trivial-phase load remains passive. Within the protocol that selects the load pulse for maximum delivered work, cycle power peaks at a finite collision number while delivered work continues to increase over the scanned range. Over the tested range, the advantage survives hopping disorder, which preserves chiral symmetry. On-site disorder breaks this symmetry and leaves a finite fraction of loads passive. Topology thus supplies a localized access channel, while spectral matching and symmetry decide whether stored energy becomes usable local work.

Braiding and fusing anyons are fundamental to topological quantum computation, yet existing circuit protocols often employ ancillas and measurements. We determine the minimal circuit resources for performing such anyon operations in quantum double models of generic finite groups. Our approach braids anyons through a sequential unitary circuit without ancillas. Intuitively, this is obtained by deforming the underlying graph on which the anyons live. More generally, we introduce graph rewiring, a diagrammatic calculus that assigns a geometric interpretation to individual two-qudit gates and tracks their action on stabilizers. For fusion, we prove a general no-go theorem excluding purely unitary protocols for fusing unknown anyon types without introducing ancillas. Remarkably, we show such "input-agnostic" fusion is enabled by simply using a qudit reset. Hence, contrary to folklore, ancilla resources are not needed to braid or fuse non-Abelian anyons (non-Abelions). This work has implications in experimental efforts in error correction: our fusion protocol highlights reset as an underutilized primitive for error correction without the spacetime-overhead of ancillas and measurements.

The measures of distance frequently used in quantum information, such as trace distance or fidelity-based purified distance, are the smallest extensions of the corresponding distance measures in classical information theory. However, this way of extending classical distances is not unique, and a whole spectrum of other extensions can be defined. Here we study the question of how quantum information processing tasks are affected by a change of the error metrics to the maximal extensions of the classical distance measures, imposing more demanding error requirements on operational tasks. We find that the performance of some tasks, such as channel coding or quantum resource distillation, is not affected whatsoever by this change. However, for other tasks such as channel simulation and quantum resource dilution, we show that the rates are now given not by functions of the standard (Umegaki) quantum relative entropy, but ones based on the Belavkin-Staszewski relative entropy. Our results connect the Belavkin-Staszewski relative entropy with operational tasks and reveal that known reversibility results in quantum information, including the reverse Shannon theorem and the asymptotic reversibility of quantum resource transformations, no longer hold under maximal distance measures.

We investigate converse bounds on the average decoding error probability in finite-blocklength classical-quantum channel coding. We first present a lower bound for multiple quantum hypothesis testing in terms of pairwise trace distances and derive a corresponding fidelity bound. We then obtain a spectrum-based converse that depends only on the a priori probabilities and spectra of the states. We show that the converse bound remains tight for the quantum depolarizing channel under suitable conditions. For codes with product-state outputs, this converse takes an explicit form involving products of output-state eigenvalues. We apply it to binary codes over the quantum amplitude damping channel using the input states $\vert+\rangle$ and $\vert-\rangle$. For this setting, we also discuss a normal approximation to the spectrum-based converse in the large blocklength regime. In all numerical examples considered, the spectrum-based converse is tighter than the other converse bounds at low noise levels.

An important question in quantum information theory asks whether every gate in the Clifford hierarchy is semi-Clifford or not, as such gates admit resource-efficient implementations via gate teleportation. Extending recent results for prime dimensions~\cite{silva_clifford_2025}, we prove that every hierarchy gate on a single qudit of dimension \(d\) is semi-Clifford, if and only if \(d\) is square-free. In composite dimensions, \(\mathbb{Z}_d^2\) is a symplectic module rather than a vector space, motivating a distinction between four types of gates. Semi-Clifford gates ($\mathcal{SC}$) are the ones that become diagonal under left and right multiplication by Clifford gates, while a broader class $\mathcal{N}$ admits a permutation diagonal form, under left and right multiplication by Cliffords. Lagrangian semi-Clifford gates ($\mathcal{LSC}$) conjugate some maximal abelian Pauli subgroup to another, whereas generalized semi-Clifford gates ($\mathcal{GSC}$) map some maximal abelian Pauli subalgebra to another under conjugation. In square-free dimensions, we have \(\mathcal{SC}=\mathcal{LSC}\) and \(\mathcal{N}=\mathcal{GSC}\), but when \(d\) is not square-free, these equivalences can fail, as Lagrangian submodules can become non-free. We also show that every third-level gate of the one-qudit Clifford hierarchy is a generalized semi-Clifford in arbitrary dimensions.

Quantum query complexity enjoys a variety of pleasing joint computation properties: for example, a composition theorem asserting $Q(f\circ g)=Θ(Q(f)Q(g))$ for all Boolean functions $f$ and $g$; a direct sum theorem asserting that computing $k$ copies of a function (or search problem) costs $Ω(k)$ times as much as the cost of computing one copy; and a direct product theorem asserting that for Boolean functions, even succeeding at the direct sum problem with exponentially small probability still requires $Ω(k)$ times the cost of computing one copy to bounded error. However, all of these results are strictly for worst-case quantum query complexity. For example, if we have a fixed distribution $μ$ over inputs, the direct sum theorem says nothing about the quantum query complexity of computing $k$ copies of $f$ when the input comes from the product distribution $μ^k$ instead of being worst-case. (Note that while a standard Yao-type minimax theorem guarantees a hard distribution for the direct sum problem, there's no guarantee that this hard distribution is a product distribution.) A similar problem occurs for the direct product theorem and the composition theorem: none of these results respect distributions. In this work, we give distributional joint computation lower bounds for the composition, direct sum, and direct product problems. Along the way, we introduce some new tools for handling quantum query lower bounds, including (a) a new ``multiplicative'' variant of the $γ_2$ norm (which we use in place of the multiplicative adversary method for proving the direct product theorem), and (b) a new ``Shaltiel-free'' measure of quantum query complexity, which we show characterizes the composition behavior of distributional quantum query complexity and satisfies pleasing properties.

We determine the two-way quantum, entanglement-distribution, private, and secret-key capacities of the pure-loss bosonic channel under an unconditional mean transmitted-photon-number constraint. For transmissivity $η$ and mean photon number $N$, all four capacities coincide and are given by $g(N)-g((1-η)N)$, where $g$ is the entropy of a thermal mode. This resolves the longstanding finite-energy capacity problem by establishing the optimality of the reverse-coherent-information rate introduced in 2009. Our central tool is sector teleportation simulation, which we develop specifically to transfer the input-energy constraint to the shared entanglement resource, thereby preserving the constraint throughout converse arguments for general adaptive protocols. For every $N>0$, we further show that the corresponding strong-converse thresholds coincide with the unconstrained value $-\log_2(1-η)$. For parallel protocols with a hard total-photon-number cutoff, the same finite-energy capacity formula instead satisfies an exponential strong converse. Together, these results establish a unified finite-energy framework for adaptive bosonic communication and reveal how energy constraints fundamentally reshape both attainable rates and converse bounds.

Magic state cultivation is a promising method for preparing high-fidelity non-Clifford resource states - a central component of fault-tolerant quantum computing - with low spacetime overhead. In benchmarking cultivation, existing resource estimates assume access to noiseless transversal measurement of the output magic state to allow for postselection during the final escape stage of the cultivation process. However, such measurements would destroy the magic state and are therefore unavailable during computation. We develop an open-boundary postselection method, Caliper, that uses only nondestructive mid-circuit syndrome information and substantially outperforms existing methods operating under these constraints. In some regimes, our postselection method uniquely recovers the resource efficiency of prior estimates. However, in other cases, we observe a tradeoff. At spacetime costs reported in previous works, the achievable logical error rates can be orders of magnitude higher, and recovering the reported logical error rate requires substantially larger codes and longer escape stages. Our results highlight how practical considerations involving mid-circuit postselection can impact the design and performance of magic state cultivation protocols.

We identify a barrier that helps explain why proving stronger quantum state-preparation lower bounds has been so difficult. In particular, we establish a quantum analogue of the Razborov-Rudich natural proofs barrier for state-preparation lower bounds. We call a property of quantum states \emph{natural} if it holds for a sufficiently large fraction of Haar-random states and can be efficiently tested when given all of the state's amplitudes. Under a standard cryptographic assumption, we show that no natural property can prove superpolynomial state-preparation lower bounds even against a fixed level of the Magic Hierarchy. We show that several existing state-preparation lower-bound techniques are natural in our sense, including arguments based on approximate degree, not being a unique ground state of a local Hamiltonian, and mutual information.

Efficient fault-tolerant quantum computing architectures benefit from low-weight logical operators. However, reported canonical bases for high-rate, high-distance codes can be several times heavier than the code distance, and fundamental obstructions can prevent minimum-weight logical operators from forming a complete canonical basis. To address this issue, we develop design principles for group-valued quantum error-correcting codes with low-weight full regular canonical logical bases, generated by translating a set of seed operators. We introduce frame width $f$, the smallest weight cutoff that permits a complete canonical logical basis, as an additional code parameter alongside distance $d$ and check weight $w$. Cataloguing these parameters together with explicit logical bases can inform resource estimates and the compilation of fault-tolerant logical operations. First, we identify a structural obstruction: for fully populated binary monomial CSS checks over a group of odd order, full regularity forces distance two, while for groups of power-of-two order, full row rank of both check matrices after replacing every group element by $1$ guarantees full regularity. Second, we demonstrate our principles through explicit high-rate lifted-product (LP) and pair-partition (PP) codes: an $[[1088,128,22]]$ LP code with $f=22$ and an $[[1024,256,24]]$ PP code with $f \leq 27$, both at $w=10$. At $w=11$, our PP constructions attain either $d=25$ with $f \leq 27$ or $d=24$ with the proved optimum $f=25$, demonstrating both a tradeoff among these parameters and a strict separation between distance and frame width. Finally, we propose a method combining symmetry reduction and stabilizer-based pruning for exhaustive distance certification, and use it to efficiently establish exact distances for LP examples with more than a thousand qubits.

We prove that every pure state of stabilizer rank at most $k$ has stabilizer extent at most $2^{O(\sqrt{k\log(k+1)})}$, and establish the analogous bound for the squared Clifford coefficient norm of Clifford-rank-$k$ operators. This implies stabilizer fidelity at least $2^{-O(\sqrt{k\log(k+1)})}$, resolving the quantitative conjecture of (Mehraban-Tamasbi, STOC, 2025), and proves an $Ω(n^2/\log n)$ lower bound for the approximate stabilizer rank of tensor powers of any non-stabilizer qubit state. The latter result generalizes the best-known lower bound for tensor powers of $T$-states (Mehraban-Tamasbi, STOC, 2024) to arbitrary non-stabilizer qubit states, including magic states. As a consequence of the Clifford rank--norm inequality, we obtain an $Ω(n^2/\log n)$ lower bound for exact representations of $n$-bit AND function by quadratic phases, improving the previous best-known linear bound. Further consequences rule out pseudorandom state and unitary ensembles with approximate stabilizer and Clifford rank $O((\log n)^2/\log\log n)$, respectively, a $\log n$ improvement over prior work (Kalra-Sinha, Quantum, 2026). We also obtain tomography algorithms for states of stabilizer rank at most $k$, with $poly(n)2^{O(\sqrt{k\log(k+1)})}$ time and copy complexity, a nearly square-root improvement in the exponent over the best-known algorithm.

We study the spectral gap of recently discovered families of KMS-detailed-balanced Gibbs-sampler Lindbladians for the mean-field Heisenberg model on $n$ spins. We show that the spectral gaps of these natural families of Lindbladians admit the same phase diagram: the gap is constant above the critical temperature (i.e., in the disordered phase), scales as $1/\sqrt{n}$ at the critical temperature, and as $1/n$ below the critical temperature (i.e., in the ordered phase). Our result builds on and extends the recent work of Basso et al.~(2026) which characterized this phase diagram for the GNS-detailed-balanced Davies generator, but only partially resolved the gap scaling at the critical temperature.

We study a Continuous-Variable Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (CV-QAOA) for high-dimensional continuous optimization. Our formulation extends an earlier CV-QAOA proposal with a variationally optimized initial state and recovers the convergence guarantees of Quantum Hamiltonian Descent (QHD) in the high-depth limit. We prove rigorous performance guarantees of CV-QAOA on several families of cost functions. First, we show $d$-step CV-QAOA minimizes any $d$-dimensional strictly convex quadratic function with $2d$ quantum queries to the cost function. We then analyze a family of nonconvex "Rotated Double Well" (RDW) functions with $2^d$ local minima introduced by arXiv:2311.00811. While prior work showed QHD reaches its global minimum with $\tilde O(d^3)$ queries, we prove that 1-step CV-QAOA solves RDW with just two quantum queries. Although general-purpose classical solvers need superpolynomial time for RDW and structure-awareness can reduce the cost to polynomial time, we show that the 1-step CV-QAOA protocol can be efficiently dequantized, and that a gradient-aligned line search succeeds with $O(d)$ queries, nearly matching the information-theoretic $Ω(d/\log d)$ query lower bound. To move beyond the dequantizable regime, we introduce a ``Rotated Square Well'' (RSW) problem, whose globally flat landscape suppresses useful local gradient information. For this family, we show that an adiabatic evolution simulated by CV-QAOA can reach the global minimum using $d^{o(1)}$ queries. On the other hand, any classical algorithm that learn the hidden rotation in RSW provably requires $Ω(d^2/\log d)$ queries, a bound we nearly match with an explicit $Θ(d^2\log d)$-query classical algorithm.Numerical simulations on deflected corrugated spring and Easom functions illustrate the promising performance of CV-QAOA on more general problems.

Publicly accessible fault-tolerant quantum computers must preserve scientific utility while limiting cryptanalytic power. We propose the restricted model of computation, 1/2BQP_1: a quantum server provides random computational-basis inputs, revealed only after execution, and one designated output bit. This interface permits arbitrary circuits and system sizes. We conjecture that a classical client making polynomially many adaptive requests cannot efficiently factor RSA moduli. The model subsumes the well-known one-clean-qubit model DQC1, retaining its applications to infinite-temperature multi-time correlations, out-of-time-order correlators, and suitably normalized partition functions. We propose a candidate for separating 1/2BQP_1 from DQC1 based on testing classical predictions of quantum spin dynamics. We argue security in two steps. First, we show that one-bit readout makes the quantum stages of standard factoring algorithms classically simulable, even when their preparation and postprocessing are redesigned within a broad family around a single arithmetic-oracle call. This covers the quantum stages of Shor, Ekera-Hastad, Kitaev, and Regev factoring constructions. Second, we examine the workaround of coherently implementing rational reconstruction to release a factor bit. Random inputs obstruct this straightforward attack: known techniques accommodate logarithmic-depth classical circuits, but rational reconstruction has resisted such parallelization for decades. Therefore, we show that security of our protocol is built on not only classical hardness for factoring, but also conjectured circuit lowerbounds for rational reconstruction.

We show that every intermediate state of a broad class of non-Clifford quantum error-correction circuits is a third-order phase-polynomial state, even under stochastic Pauli noise. The class includes magic state distillation and cultivation, code switching and gauge fixing, transversal non-Clifford gates with syndrome extraction, and injection of diagonal magic states. Third-order phase-polynomial states strictly generalize stabilizer states, and we prove that they are exactly the stabilizer states of the diagonal-Clifford-and-Pauli (DCP) stabilizer formalism that we introduce. We characterize these states and show that their representations can be updated in polynomial time. This yields an exact polynomial-time simulation algorithm for these circuits and, more broadly, a framework for reasoning about their internal states and about magic states in general. We provide an open-source implementation, \texttt{merlin}, and benchmark it against existing non-Clifford simulators on distillation, cultivation, and code switching circuits. The benchmarks demonstrate improved runtime and memory scaling as the number of logical outputs grows in Bravyi-Haah distillation, and simulation of a code switching circuit beyond the reach of all other tested simulators.

We study agnostic tomography of pure bosonic Gaussian states: given copies of an arbitrary $n$-mode bosonic state $ρ$, the goal is to output a pure Gaussian state whose infidelity with $ρ$ is at most $\mathrm{opt} + ε$, where $\mathrm{opt}$ is the minimum infidelity achievable by any pure Gaussian state. We give efficient protocols achieving this in both the high and low fidelity regimes. When $\mathrm{opt}$ is below some universal constant, our protocol has runtime and copy complexity which is strongly polynomial in $n, 1/ε$ and $\log \log E$, where $E$ is the energy of the closest pure Gaussian state. For arbitrary $\mathrm{opt}$, our protocol uses $(n+1)^{\mathrm{poly}(1/ε)} \mathrm{poly}\left(1+\log\log(E)\right)$ copies and runtime. As a corollary, we obtain the first truly tolerant Gaussianity testing protocol for distinguishing whether $\mathrm{opt} > c + ε$ or $\mathrm{opt} < c - ε$, for any threshold $c\in(0,1)$. We also prove $\mathrm{poly}(n,1/ε)$ runtime is impossible, unless $\mathrm{NP}\subseteq\mathrm{BQP}$. Our protocols follow a shared paradigm: first, we iteratively use general Gaussian measurements combined with techniques from classical robust statistics to obtain a good warm start estimate, then we leverage non-Gaussian measurements to refine this warm start using convex and non-convex optimization methods. Interestingly, we prove that non-Gaussian measurements are necessary to match the strong agnostic guarantees we obtain, and in fact these guarantees are provably superior to what is possible for robustly estimating classical Gaussians.

We consider the problem of quantum 1-PCA: given copies of an unknown $n$-qubit mixed state, recover a classical description of its leading eigenvector. Our goal is to do so using non-adaptive and single-qubit measurements. For an $n$-qubit state with top eigenvalue $λ$ and spectral gap at least $Δ> 0$, we give an algorithm that recovers the leading eigenvector to fidelity at least $1 - \varepsilon$ with high probability using $\tilde{O}\left( {2^n \cdot η^2} / {Δ^3 \varepsilon^3}\right)$ copies and $\tilde{O}((2^n/Δ\varepsilon) \cdot \operatorname{poly}(η/Δ\varepsilon))$ time, where $η= \max (1 - λ, \varepsilon)$. All of our measurements are non-adaptively chosen, and performed in single-qubit Pauli bases. When the spectral gap is constant and the desired accuracy is comparable to the noise level, i.e. $\varepsilon = Ω(η)$, our runtime and copy complexity become $\tilde{O} (2^n / \varepsilon)$. This generalizes the guarantees of Grewal et al. [arXiv:2601.04444], who achieved similar rates, but under the assumption $η= 0$, i.e., that the state was pure. Our results show that the same rates hold in the presence of state misspecification, up to polylogarithmic factors. From a technical perspective, our algorithm works by recursively constructing low-dimensional subspaces that approximately preserve the target eigenvector. To achieve nearly linear runtime dependence on the dimension of the Hilbert space, we develop a novel structured Pauli sampling scheme that enables fast batched computation of exponentially many projected Pauli matrices.

The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model is a strongly interacting fermionic system that has been well-studied in condensed matter and high energy physics. It is highly quantum: Gaussian states are far from the thermal state (Hastings and O'Donnell, STOC'22) and representing the thermal state requires large polynomial-size quantum circuits (Anschuetz et al., QIP'25). Very recently, it was nonetheless proven that classical algorithms can estimate local thermal expectations at sufficiently high temperature in quasipolynomial time (Zlokapa, FOCS'26). We show that classical algorithms can in fact estimate local observables at all constant temperatures in polynomial time. Our techniques also extend straightforwardly to classical systems: we resolve an open question about computing thermal expectations of a classical spin glass up to its phase transition (Bencs et al., STOC'26). Our proof develops a fully rigorous quantum cavity method. Due to the success of the classical cavity method in optimization, sampling, inference and learning, we expect the quantum cavity method to find further applications of independent interest. As an example, we give a quantum algorithm that learns SYK Hamiltonians from the Gibbs state at any constant temperature with polynomial time and sample complexity.

We study hybrid quantum-classical algorithms in the query model. The computation consists of quantum subroutines that make at most $q$ oracle queries; between subroutines, all qubits are measured and discarded. We prove matching upper and lower bounds for several problems in this model: (i) (Unbiased) Phase estimation up to a precision $ε$ requires $Θ(\frac{1}{q ε^2})$ queries; (ii) (Unbiased) Amplitude estimation up to a precision $ε$ requires $Θ(\frac{p(1-p)}{q ε^2})$ queries; (iii) Search among $N$ items requires $Θ(\frac{N}{q})$ queries; (iv) Two level AND-OR tree (AND of $m$ ORs, with $n$ inputs to each OR) requires $Θ(\frac{nm}{q})$ queries. All of these bounds are optimal up to a constant factor, for all $q$ from 1, corresponding to the classical complexity, to $Q(f)$, the unrestricted quantum query complexity of the respective problem. We also derive a hybrid lower bound for distinguishing two distributions specified by a state-preparation unitary; this bound is tight up to a logarithmic factor. Besides specific lower bounds, an important contribution is developing methods for proving lower bounds on hybrid quantum algorithms (which have been very ad-hoc up to now). The first two bounds follow from a common framework: we analyze probability distributions over measurement transcripts and bound a progress measure that captures their distinguishability. The AND-OR bound requires a more delicate argument, combining two progress measures that track the information available to the algorithm classically and in quantum form, respectively.

Nonlocal games offer a conceptually clear way to reason about Bell nonlocality. However, we show that as originally defined, and most commonly used, i.e. with a deterministic predicate, they cannot be complete witnesses of nonlocality. Concretely, we prove the existence of nonlocal behaviours which do not violate any such nonlocal game. Furthermore, we also show that quantum mechanics can produce these game-classical nonlocal behaviours. We prove that this phenomenon exists in every bipartite scenario $(X,Y,A,B)$ with $X,Y\geq2$ and $A,B\geq4$.

We use an instanton-based analysis to show that Path Integral Stochastic Gradient Descent (PISGD), a classical optimization algorithm instantiated from path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC), can inherit the quantum tunneling mechanism. Quantum tunneling is the phenomenon in which a quantum particle passes through a potential barrier that a classical trajectory cannot cross in the same way. This mechanism can contribute to the performance of quantum optimization algorithms, since a common bottleneck in optimization is that the solution becomes trapped in a local minimum, separated from better solutions by a potential barrier. Classical noise-driven optimizers, such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD), have escape times that scale exponentially with the potential barrier height. For quantum tunneling, the escape time is instead exponential in the bounce action, which equals twice the Agmon distance between the two basins. When the barrier is tall but thin, quantum tunneling can allow escaping local minima faster than such classical methods. Remarkably, this scaling is not exclusive to algorithms with genuine quantum dynamics. For PISGD applied to classical nonconvex global optimization, we adapt Kramers' escape-rate theory to path space and obtain the same exponential scaling as quantum tunneling, in terms of the bounce action rather than the barrier height. We confirm this scaling numerically by implementing PISGD for both separable and nonseparable potentials. That said, PISGD retains only incoherent tunneling, since coherence among multiple tunneling paths is absent. Our analysis therefore does not rule out a potential quantum advantage for quantum-tunneling-based algorithms over classical ones in general.

Bosonic and fermionic Gaussian quantum states are families of quantum states that play a central role in quantum physics and quantum information processing. We study the problem of testing whether a given state is either Gaussian, or has bounded overlap with any Gaussian state. Previous analyses of this testing problem led to tests that require a number of copies of the state that scales with the number of modes (the system size). In this work we show that a constant number of copies of the state suffices. We derive these results based on the symmetries of identical copies of Gaussian states, and by bounding the distance to the set of Gaussian states through a gradient flow and a spectral bound studied previously for the Kac random walk on a sphere.

We propose a four-level scheme for generating a uniform imaginary magnetic field for ultracold atoms using Raman coupling and state-dependent particle losses. Eliminating two lossy auxiliary states and subsequently projecting onto one of the two remaining Raman dressed atomic states, the atomic motion is affected by an imaginary vector potential with a constant curl corresponding to a spatially uniform imaginary synthetic magnetic field. We analytically derive the Gaussian wavepacket dynamics for atoms in such a synthetic magnetic field and study the width-dependent transport, which is unique to non-Hermitian systems. We find numerical agreement between the two-level non-Hermitian Hamiltonian and the adiabatic projection description, confirming the applicability of the latter adiabatic approach.

Recent work has shown that syndrome information obtained during error-corrected quantum computation can be utilized for logical error mitigation (LEM), yielding exponential reductions in runtime overhead compared to external'' LEM methods, which do not make use of syndrome data. However, these syndrome-aware LEM methods (SALEM) generally require adaptive circuit operations based on real-time processing of syndromes. Here, we introduce syndrome-based offline logical error mitigation (SOLEM), a framework that utilizes syndrome data entirely in post-processing, without any modification to the given error-corrected circuit. In this sense, SOLEM is built into'' error-corrected circuits, and is in fact simpler to implement than external LEM protocols. The basic idea of SOLEM is to use naturally occurring syndrome-conditioned logical error channels in place of deliberate circuit modifications. We develop unbiased and heuristic estimators within this framework, including offline logical versions of probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) and zero-noise extrapolation (ZNE), as well as a global-regression estimator. SOLEM's fully offline nature leads to three significant advantages. First, SOLEM can post-process syndromes with a more powerful decoder than the one used in real time. Second, multiple estimators can be constructed from the same measured data and optimized using empirical statistical errors and related performance metrics. Third, logical error characterization is needed only in post-processing, allowing characterization data to be collected during circuit execution and reducing sensitivity to hardware drift. Remarkably, SOLEM estimators can achieve these advantages while attaining a runtime overhead which is exponentially lower than that of external LEM and is comparable to that of corresponding SALEM estimators.

Elastic scattering can generate entanglement and non-local magic between the spins of the two outgoing particles. The amount of entanglement and magic produced is encoded in the S-matrix; a unitary quantum gate that acts on the joint Hilbert space of the two spin-J particles. Previous work derived the entanglement power in terms of the scattering phase shifts for rotationally invariant S-matrices with J=1/2,1,3/2. In this paper, a closed form solution is derived for all J. We further prove that a broad class of non-local quantum resources depend to leading order only on the squared projective Hilbert-Schmidt distance from the nearest non-entangling gate. This holds for the entanglement power and non-local magic power, and the choice of resource simply changes the overall normalization. This universality establishes a common geometric origin for the leading resource-generating capacity of scattering, independent of the details of the interaction.

We study the one-way communication complexity of the $f$-Boolean Hidden Partition problem. Here, Alice is given an $n$-bit string and Bob is given $Ω(n)$ disjoint blocks of its indices together with a string of labels. Under the promise that the evaluations of $f$ on these blocks either agree with all of the labels or disagree with all of them, Bob must determine which is the case using a single message from Alice. This problem generalizes the Boolean Hidden Matching and Hidden Hypermatching problems, which capture the special case where $f$ is the parity function. We establish classical and quantum communication bounds for $f$-Boolean Hidden Partition in terms of the sign degree $d$ of $f$, proving a conjecture of Doriguello and Montanaro (TQC 2020). Their prior work gave logarithmic communication upper bounds for classical protocols when $d \le 1$ and quantum protocols when $d \le 2$, as well as polynomial lower bounds for certain structured functions with larger sign degree. We show that for every $f$ of sign degree $d \ge 2$, the randomized classical communication complexity of this problem is $Θ(n^{1-1/d})$ while its quantum communication complexity lies between $Ω(n^{1-2/d})$ and $\bO{n^{1-1/\lceil d/2 \rceil} \log n}$. This completely characterizes the functions $f$ admitting polynomial quantum advantage as those for which $d \ge 2$, with a new infinite family of exponential separations given by the case $d = 2$.

The information-theoretic approach to entanglement typically relies on arbitrarily many input copies and unboundedly complex operations; however, the available resources are constrained in reality. This motivates the study of entanglement theory with limited resources. One of its central questions is which quantities characterize entanglement manipulations, and so far, only the idealized case of pure states has been well explored. In this work, we address entanglement distillation from mixed states and identify the Rényi coherent information as the quantity determining the optimal rate in the worst case under two distinct resource constraints. We first characterize the sample-efficient regime, in which unbounded computational power is allowed. Our universal protocol achieves this rate without knowledge of the input state under certain polynomial rank constraints. This rate is optimal among universal protocols: we construct states whose distillable entanglement is nearly extensive, yet from which no universal sample-efficient protocol attains a rate above their Rényi coherent information. We then push this characterization to the computationally efficient frontier: the same bound holds for any efficient protocol even when the input state is known, and another universal protocol achieves this rate efficiently under additional polynomial constraints on the marginal ranks. Overall, our results give the Rényi coherent information a novel operational meaning in two computational settings: universal distillation with limited copies and efficient distillation even with knowledge of the input state.

Closure phase enables imaging with ground-based interferometric arrays by canceling telescope-dependent phase errors due to atmospheric fluctuations. It can be obtained by measuring fringe phases on individual baselines forming a triangle and summing them. We show that closure phases can be measured more accurately with fewer photons by performing joint measurements on multiple photons. We first establish that at least three photons from the same atmospheric temporal phase-stability window are required for closure-phase information to survive the unknown telescope-dependent phase noise, and show that joint three-photon measurements already provide an advantage over single-photon measurements in the minimal three-telescope setting. We then turn to large arrays and consider estimating all bispectra---complex quantities whose phases are the closure phases---under a global mean-square error criterion. Although an $m$-telescope array contains $Θ(m^2)$ independent triangle bispectra, we show that physical constraints on the visibilities make the total information content grow only nearly linearly with $m$ at fixed accuracy. Exploiting this structure, we construct an efficient protocol using at most three-photon joint measurements with photon cost $\tilde{O}(m)$, whereas any sequential single-photon protocol requires $Ω(m^2)$ photons. When the number of detected photons per temporal stability window scales linearly with the array size, this allows the required exposure time to remain independent of $m$ up to logarithmic factors. We further analyze the complementary high-precision regime using multiparameter quantum metrology and find a similar advantage for collective measurements. Overall, our results show that quantum information processing techniques can substantially improve the sensitivity and robustness of optical interferometry.

We give a shadow tomography algorithm that uses $O(\log(m) \log(m/δ) / \varepsilon^2)$ copies of the input state. Specifically, given a quantum state $ρ$ and observables $O_1,\ldots,O_m$, the algorithm outputs estimates of $\mathrm{tr}(O_iρ)$ for all $i\in[m]$ that are all accurate to within $\pm\varepsilon$, except with probability at most $δ$. The key idea is to work in the average-case setting: for a random state drawn from a known prior, a pretty good measurement on $O(\log(m)/\varepsilon^2)$ copies gives a constant-error guarantee on all but a small fraction of the prior. Boosting this guarantee gives an average-case shadow tomography algorithm, and the minimax principle then (non-constructively) implies the existence of a measurement with the same worst-case guarantee. We also identify an obstruction to further improvement with this approach. While pretty good measurements amplify success over the randomness of the prior, they do not amplify success over the randomness of measurement. This issue appears to be inherent, and gives rise to the remaining $\log(m)$ factor separating the complexity of the quantum problem from its classical counterpart.

The seminal Kyle model offers a framework to understand the price impact of an informed trader in a market model for a single asset. We study variants in which the asset's future value is modeled by a classical random walk and by a continuous-time quantum walk, respectively. With these assumptions, we analytically approximate and numerically identify the market equilibrium between risk-neutral market maker and informed trader. In the classical equilibrium, the informed trader possesses a linear strategy, whereas the market maker's pricing rule resembles a logistic curve. The informed trader's profit is also identified to grow sub-linearly with time t. In the quantum equilibrium, the informed trader's strategy forms multiple clusters and the pricing rule exhibits multiple jumps correspondingly. Despite the increasing non-linearity of the equilibrium, the informed trader's profit grows linearly with time t.

Fault-tolerant quantum computation typically relies on a fixed set of logical primitives, while realizing other desired operations can require substantial resources. We introduce irrep surface codes (ISCs), two-dimensional topological quantum error-correcting codes engineered to transversally implement a prescribed set of logical gates. The engineered gates only need to satisfy two conditions: (i) they generate a finite group, which, up to global phases, is forced by the Eastin-Knill theorem, and (ii) they are irreducible, meaning that any operator commuting with the set of gates must be proportional to the identity. This accommodates arbitrary finite groups of diagonal gates and arbitrary reversible classical gates, since each can be embedded into a larger irreducible finite group of gates. It also enables logical gates outside every finite level of the Clifford hierarchy. To incorporate these operations into surface-code computations, we further develop lattice-surgery protocols to transfer the encoded information between surface codes and ISCs obeying either of two sufficient conditions. Together, these results establish a systematic method for tailoring topological codes to desired logical operations and integrating them into conventional computations.

We establish general conditions for the rapid convergence of propagation algorithms for computing expectation values of local observables in quantum many-body systems, covering both spin and fermionic systems. Our results apply to evolutions that are sufficiently contractive, providing a general mechanism by which contractivity controls the growth generated by local interactions and enables efficient classical simulation. As a first application, we consider noisy time evolution generated by local Hamiltonians on arbitrary interaction graphs. We show that the dynamics can be efficiently simulated when the noise strength $λ$ is sufficiently large compared to the degree of the interaction graph. More generally, for systems with an interaction strength $u$, our bounds determine a time horizon $t_{\text{max}}$ as a function of the interaction strength $u$, the noise strength $λ$, and the interaction structure below which the algorithm is efficient. In the noiseless limit, $λ=0$, our analysis extends the efficiently simulable time scale from $\log(1/u)$ proved in Facelli, Fawzi, and Fawzi (2026) to $t_{\text{max}} \sim 1/u$ matching the recent improvement by Zhao, Marvian and Tong (2026). As a second application, we apply the same framework to the computation of local observables in Gibbs states of local Hamiltonians. We consider a pseudo-Lindbladian whose steady state is the Gibbs state and show that, at sufficiently high temperature, its propagation algorithm converges rapidly. In particular, for weakly-interacting systems with interaction strength $u$, our result applies up to inverse temperatures $β\sim\log(1/u)$.

Clifford and matchgate circuits are canonical families of classically simulable quantum circuits. Their intersection, the matchgate-Clifford group, plays an important role in randomized fermionic protocols and in matchgate synthesis. Its adjoint action is isomorphic to the group of unit-determinant signed permutations of $2n$ Majorana modes, and we study optimal exact synthesis in this group. That is, given a target unitary and a gate set, output an $n$-qubit circuit implementing the target using the fewest operations. We show that the complexity of this problem strongly depends on the gate set. In particular, we study gate sets consisting of Majorana braids with different connectivity graphs. For path and complete graphs, we prove that the problem is classically solvable in $\mathcal{O}\left(n^2\right)$ time, and we provide explicit gate-optimal compilers. In addition, we prove that when the connectivity graph is a tree, the decision version of the optimal synthesis problem becomes NP-complete. Finally, we benchmark our optimal compiler on chains of up to $n=80$ qubits against those of \texttt{Qiskit} and \texttt{Tket}, obtaining circuits with constant factor improvements $\times2.57$ and $\times2.28$ in the total number of gates, respectively.

In a previous work, we showed that real quantum theory (RQT) cannot be experimentally distinguished from ordinary quantum theory (QT). In this paper, we investigate whether this indistinguishability survives two natural extensions of the setting: allowing separated measurements to be represented by commuting rather than tensor-product observables, and imposing superselection rules, as in fermionic information theory. We show that it does in both cases. Our first result is a positive answer to the Tsirelson problem in RQT: commuting and tensor-product measurements generate the same finite-dimensional correlations. This is surprisingly not a trivial consequence of the standard complex proof, as it does not carry over to the reals. The proof obstruction becomes particularly relevant in the presence of superselection rules, which is why we first establish the equivalence in RQT before extending the framework to superselected RQT. Our second result is a local, real quantum formulation of superselected theories. We extend the RQT framework to accommodate a representation of superselection over the reals and show, in particular, that it admits a fermionic version whose predictions are experimentally indistinguishable from those of fermionic information theory. More generally, the construction extends to all superselected QTs.

We derive rates of exponential relative-entropy decay for a broad class of infinite-dimensional quantum Gibbs samplers. A key technical ingredient is a perturbative stability theory for hypercontractive estimates and logarithmic Sobolev inequalities. For suitably chosen dissipative couplings, we obtain exponential entropy decay for full multimode Bose-Hubbard samplers with arbitrary hopping and repulsive density interactions. For harmonically confined quantum Coulomb gases and molecular systems, we prove exponential entropy decay for every fixed finite-rank low-energy truncation of the interaction. Finally, we exhibit a periodic charging model with a positive spectral gap but no finite-time $L^2$-to-$L^p$ bound for any $p>2$.

We exhibit a classical oracle relative to which QMA \neq QMA(2). The separation is based on a separable Hamiltonian problem defined by signed edge constraints on a graph. The YES instances have zero-energy product states, while the NO instances, constructed using the antisymmetric subspace, have entangled zero-energy states but no low-energy product states. For the QMA lower bound, we use compressed-oracle techniques to track the information learned by a quantum computation making few queries to a YES instance. The key step is to map the resulting superpositions of partial oracle records to the NO family without significantly changing the verifier's behavior.

We study collective state preparation and channel encoding in fermionic systems under parity superselection and composition governed by the canonical anticommutation relations. For a two-mode Gaussian state $τ$, we obtain the exact entanglement of formation, $E_{\mathrm F}^{\mathrm{phys}}(τ^{\otimes m})=\lceil m/2\rceil\log2$ for every $m\geq1$. Two copies have the same formation value as one, violating additivity and strong superadditivity, while regularization halves the single-copy value. For an associated Gaussian channel, we determine the minimum output entropy and Holevo information at every blocklength and prove nonadditivity of both. Together, these results give exact answers to the fermionic counterparts of the four additivity questions associated with Shor and Hastings. One physical use carries no classical information, whereas two uses transmit one bit perfectly. The unassisted classical and zero-error classical capacities both equal one half bit per mode. A sharp finite-block bound gives a strong converse: the decoding success probability vanishes at every rate above capacity. These optimizations cover all physical pure-state decompositions and channel inputs, with Gaussian ensembles and classical codes attaining the optima. The formation and minimum output entropy formulas hold for every Rényi order $α\in(0,\infty]$. We also determine the unassisted quantum and zero-error quantum capacities, both equal to one half logical qubit per mode, and prove a strong converse: entanglement fidelity vanishes at every rate above capacity. For a noisy Gaussian family, we determine the one- and two-copy formation values and prove strict nonadditivity at full rank. For $τ$, Bell violation under local parity-preserving measurements first appears at three copies.

Self-testing certifies quantum states and measurements from observed correlations alone, without requiring a description of the devices that produce them. In this work we establish, to the best of our knowledge, the first robust self-test of the full continuous family of measurements generated by Majorana operators. We achieve this by showing that the Grothendieck game, a two-player nonlocal game in which the players receive directions on a sphere and return binary answers, is a self-test of Majorana observables. That is, any near-optimal performance certifies an entire continuously parameterized family of quantum measurements. We further extend this certification to products of Majorana observables, obtaining a robust self-test of the spin representation of the continuous pin group.

We study the emergent randomness in projected ensembles generated by dual-unitary circuits. Specifically, we consider evolution by solvable dual-unitary brickwork circuits followed by measurements on part of the system, which induce an ensemble of states on the unmeasured subsystem. Previous work has established that this projected ensemble of states forms a quantum state design in the limit where the bath size is large, but the rate of convergence at finite bath size has not been rigorously established. Under three inverse-polynomial assumptions, local permutation mixing, a bound on recurrent backward motion, and contraction at the measured boundary, we fill this gap and prove that a bath of polynomial size suffices to form approximate $k$-designs. In establishing our results, we develop a microscopic transport interpretation of emergent randomness in the projected ensemble, in which deviations from local permutation operators appear as defects, and make connections with the theory of quantum walks.

Decoded quantum interferometry (DQI) uses classical error correction to solve optimization problems, but it is hard to tell which problems could give it a quantum advantage. We develop soundness rules that screen candidate problems by their code parameters, decoding guarantees and classical baselines. For the standard objective of counting satisfied constraints, we prove that under worst-case Hamming decoding DQI's guarantee can exceed Prange completion by at most $(\sqrt{2}-1)/2$. Optimal polynomial intersection (OPI) attains this margin cap asymptotically, so no candidate in this setting can exceed OPI's margin. We also derive a performance law for real-valued objectives: the objective fixes both the solution quality and which errors the decoder must correct. An AI-agent search guided by these rules found two candidate applications. Alternant max-agreement on McEliece-type public keys tests what a secret decoder is worth to DQI against classical solvers that see only the public instance. Multiplicative polynomial intersection, a knapsack-type problem built from discrete logarithms, pairs a cosine objective with a public decoder for signed errors. For both we prove decoding guarantees and finite-length comparisons with Prange restarts, and on the larger instances we tested, DQI's expected quality exceeds what our classical solvers reach within fixed budgets.

Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes offer a promising route to reducing the qubit overhead of fault tolerance, with recent ultra-high-rate constructions achieving encoding rates above one half. In this work, we develop fast and parallel logical computation methods for ultra-high-rate codes. We first utilize the group symmetries of the codes to partition the logical qubits into orbits, and then apply parallel surgery methods to implement group-invariant collections of logical Pauli-product measurements. These measurements are highly programmable, as we may arbitrarily couple logical orbits as long as each measurement is repeated across the whole orbit(s). To reduce the space and time overheads, we develop a technique called chain-map convolution, which uses the group structure to boost both the spatial and temporal distances of our protocol in a highly efficient manner. As case studies, we construct distance-preserving parallel measurement gadgets for the [[256, 68, 12]], [[576, 148, 18]] pair-partition codes, and a [[1152, 580, 12]] rate-$1/2$ code, with only around $2.5\times$ space overhead and 3-4 rounds of syndrome extraction each. The same methods also enable parallel injection of cultivated magic states into high-rate codes. Finally, we extend programmability through subgroup restrictions, revealing a tradeoff between logical control and the spacetime resources required for fault tolerance and highlighting the crucial role structured parallelism plays in reducing overhead. These results provide new methods for designing qLDPC logical operations with low spacetime overhead, opening a route toward more efficient fault-tolerant quantum architectures.

We study a variant of Schumacher compression. The task asks for the minimal memory cost for compressing many copies of a density matrix with known spectrum and unknown eigenbasis, without preserving its purification. For fixed dimension and distinct positive eigenvalues, we obtain the cost through its additive constant. Achievability uses a generalization of Werner's cloning map to $\mathrm{GL}(d,\mathbb C)$ irreducible representations, with finite trace-distance bounds controlled by highest-weight differences and row gaps. The matching converse follows from a quantitative form of Koashi--Imoto incompressibility for irreducible group orbits under a spectral-gap assumption. We also identify the relation between this quantum minimum description length and universal lossless coding overhead, and its connection to free entropy is explained in a companion letter. We provide a Lean certificate for our proofs.

In free probability, Voiculescu's free entropy counts matrix microstates that approximate an operator. It is a non-commutative analog of the Shannon entropy, distinct from any quantum entropy of a density operator, but it has had no physical meaning in quantum theory. We define a finite-dimensional physical free entropy at finite resolution and show that it directly characterizes, up to an explicit constant, the minimal quantum memory needed to program many copies of a state with known eigenvalues and unknown eigenbasis. This task is a variant of Schumacher compression, and we call its optimal cost the quantum minimum description length. We briefly discuss how free entropy differs from quantum entropies and its potential applications in quantum physics.

Since the introduction of the complexity class QMA as a quantum-verifier analogue of NP (Kitaev, 1997), many have wondered whether quantum proofs are necessary or classical proofs suffice - that is, whether QMA = QCMA or QCMA != QMA (Aharonov and Naveh, 2002; Aaronson and Kuperberg, CCC '07). This longstanding question was recently answered by works of Bostanci, Haferkamp, Nirkhe, and Zhandry (STOC '26) and Bostanci, Huang, and Vaikuntanathan (FOCS '26), which showed that quantum proofs are more powerful than classical ones in the classical-oracle setting. However, it remains unclear what exactly makes quantum proofs more powerful than classical ones. In the information-theoretic setting, a family of quantum states is not classicalizable if and only if it is unclonable. Indeed, these recent works also explicitly highlight the unclonability of their quantum proofs as a key mechanism behind their separations, and their arguments crucially rely on this property. This raises the question of whether unclonability is necessary for quantum proofs to be more powerful than classical ones. In this work, we show that even clonable quantum proofs can be more powerful than classical ones relative to a classical oracle by constructing a classical oracle O such that QCMA^O != ClonableQMA^O. This resolves the open question of Nehoran and Zhandry (ITCS '24), who established the analogous separation relative to a quantum oracle. We also show a classical-oracle separation between BQP/clonableqpoly and BQP/poly, and give applications of our results to quantum cryptography.

We consider the computational task of anti-symmetrization of an unknown mixed quantum state: Given iid copies of a rank-$r$ qudit state $ρ=\sum_{i=1}^r λ_i |\varphi_i\rangle\!\langle\varphi_i|$, prepare a copy of the state proportional to $Π_{\mathrm{anti}}^r (|\varphi_1\rangle\otimes \ldots\otimes|\varphi_r\rangle)$, with $Π_{\mathrm{anti}}^r$ the anti-symmetric subspace projector. We first give a simple algorithm for anti-symmetrization that uses $\widetilde{O}(r / λ_{\min})$ copies of $ρ$, where $λ_{\min}$ is the minimum non-zero eigenvalue of $ρ$. This algorithm works even in the streaming setting with small working memory, and it uses only simple quantum operations like controlled-SWAPs and constantly many layers of single-qubit gates. As an application of this streaming anti-symmetrization procedure, we give a reduction from gapped mixed-state one-way state generators to pure-state one-way state generators. Then, using tools from Schur-Weyl duality, we give and analyze a second (non-streaming) anti-symmetrization procedure that uses $O(r / λ_{\min})$ copies of $ρ$, which then serves as a building block in new algorithms for weak Schur sampling and unitary Schur sampling, outperforming existing approaches in some regimes of number of copies $n$ and local dimension $d$, as well as in an algorithm for optimal purity amplification for qudit states.

Partial distinguishability affects multiphoton interference, which is central to large-scale photonic experiments such as Boson Sampling and to applications of multiphoton states across quantum technologies. Characterizing the internal degrees of freedom responsible for this behavior is challenging: in many scenarios they cannot be accessed directly and even their dimension or physical nature may be unknown \emph{a priori}. Here we introduce Gram-matrix tomography for independently prepared photons with pure or nearly pure internal states. For pure states, the Gram matrix contains all information required to predict the statistics of experiments that are insensitive to the internal degrees of freedom. We reconstruct this matrix, up to physically irrelevant phase choices, from a quadratic number of measurable Bargmann invariants (quantities encoding overlap magnitudes and collective phases). We access these quantities using two complementary approaches: targeted Fourier interferometers and two- and three-body photon-number correlations measured in a single random interferometer. We derive explicit error bounds that control the total-variation distance between predicted and actual outcome distributions for any subsequent experiment that is insensitive to the internal states. These guarantees account for finite sampling and deviations from purity. Crucially, the total sample complexity of the protocol is independent of the internal Hilbert-space dimension and polynomial under mild assumptions on overlaps of internal states. Our protocol uses standard interferometric measurements and turns them into a robust and operationally grounded characterization of partially distinguishable photons.

A major practical obstacle to Regev's factoring algorithm is its large space usage. In particular, the algorithm was believed to be incompatible with "qubit recycling," which streams the control qubits in phase estimation rather than storing them all simultaneously. We show how to fix this streaming problem. We build on the construction of Ragavan and Vaikuntanathan, which used Fibonacci accumulators to reduce the qubit count from $O(n^{1.5})$ to $11.32n$. We make two key improvements. First, we use superposition masking to prevent unwanted information from entering the accumulators, removing the need for uncomputation. Second, we show how to perform phase estimation using Fibonacci powers of a unitary operation rather than powers of two. This avoids various encoding conversions required by the construction of Ragavan and Vaikuntanathan. After these improvements, the phase-estimation qubits are used only once in the circuit, allowing them to be streamed. Our improvements reduce the space usage of Regev's factoring algorithm to $n+M(n)+O(\sqrt{n})$, where $M(n)$ is the space required for an in-place multiplication. For example, using the in-place multiplier of Luo et al. (2026), Regev's algorithm can factor an $n$-bit integer using $4n+O(\sqrt{n})$ qubits. Although our construction still falls short of the $n/2+εn$ qubits sufficient for leading implementations of Shor's algorithm, it is the lowest-space instantiation of Regev's algorithm to date and suggests that Regev's algorithm is still far from fully optimized.

The Eastin-Knill theorem rules out a universal set of transversal logical gates on any code that detects single-qubit errors. The theorem constrains one partition of the qubits at a time. We show that depth-one layers of few-qubit gates, each respecting its own partition, can together generate a universal logical gate set on an error-correcting code. Each logical gate generator is then a single depth-one layer followed by error correction of the same stabilizer code, with no magic-state distillation, code switching, gauge fixing, lattice surgery, or other gadgets. We show that such codes can be found by applying an entangling circuit to a lower-distance "seed" code admitting a depth-one non-Clifford gate and an appropriate "kernel" code. We construct 47 codes with depth-one generating sets that tolerate at least one faulty gate per layer, including a [[37,1,7]] and a [[59,1,9]] code, both of check weight at most eight.

How can random order change the role of quantum memory in streaming? Later classical input can restore the usefulness of a quantum state consumed by earlier queries. We call this replenishment. We construct an artificial problem based on Hidden Matching, with repeated coordinate data and online matching requests. It admits a one-pass quantum algorithm using polylogarithmic space in uniformly random order, but unconditionally requires polynomial space both classically in random order and quantumly when all updates precede the requests. To prove the quantum lower bound, we strengthen the consumability bounds of Gilboa, Jain, and McClean for Multiple Hidden Matching. Without prior entanglement, any quantum encoding supporting $r$ independent matching requests requires $Ω(r)$ qubits for $r\le N^{1/2-δ}$ and every fixed $δ\in(0,1/2)$, even with simultaneous revelation and arbitrary joint decoding. For sequential requests, the linear bound extends through $r=Θ(\sqrt N)$. We also adapt Kallaugher's triangle-counting algorithm to uniformly random streams in which every edge is repeated equally often. Rebuilding the quantum sketch and resampling the classical estimator improve its expected-space bound in suitable parameter regimes. Finally, we extend the robust Noisy Gap Cycle framework of Assadi and Sundaresan to quantum streaming. A quantum communication lower bound for Block Hidden XOR yields an $Ω(n)$ space lower bound in random edge order for large enough cycles, with consequences for several graph problems. Thus random order can enable replenishment of small quantum representations, while substantial space requirements persist for other tasks.

Measurement incompatibility enables quantum advantages in communication and state discrimination. It is also necessary for Bell nonlocality, which is used in device-independent protocols for quantum key distribution and private randomness generation. Classical communication can influence the receiver's outcome and must therefore be accounted for when certifying measurement incompatibility. We introduce union maximal leakage, which quantifies the information needed for a common classical explanation of all observed probabilities and is computed from them by a linear program. If a message of at most $k$ bits precedes the receiver's independent measurement choice, compatible measurements for each message give union maximal leakage at most $k$. This bound holds with any input-independent nonsignalling shared resource. In quantum theory, a violation also implies that the initially shared state is entangled. Conversely, union maximal leakage determines the minimum classical communication needed to reproduce the observations with compatible measurements and arbitrary nonsignalling assistance. For a fixed shared quantum state and receiver measurements, a violation is possible exactly when, for some message value, the receiver's measurements are Bell-nonlocal against two-outcome sender measurements on that state. For binary receiver outcomes, we show that a violation also certifies randomness private from the sender, even when the receiver's measurement depends on the sender's message and the sender retains quantum side information. We quantify this privacy through an explicit conditional entropy bound and establish composably secure randomness extraction in sequential protocols with device memory.