Decoupling with Random Quantum Circuits

Luís T. A. N. Brandão, René Peralta

Winton Brown, Omar Fawzi

Random transformations are typically good at "scrambling" information. Specifically, in the quantum setting, scrambling usually refers to the process of mapping most initial pure product states under a unitary transformation to states which are macroscopically entangled, in the sense of being close to completely mixed on most subsystems containing a fraction fn of all n particles for some constant f. While the term scrambling is used in the context of the black hole information paradox, scrambling is related to problems involving decoupling in general, and to the question of how large isolated many-body systems reach local thermal equilibrium under their own unitary dynamics. Here, we study the speed at which various notions of scrambling/decoupling occur in a simplified but natural model of random two-particle interactions: random quantum circuits. For a circuit representing the dynamics generated by a local Hamiltonian, the depth of the circuit corresponds to time. Thus, we consider the depth of these circuits and we are typically interested in what can be done in a depth that is sublinear or even logarithmic in the size of the system. We resolve an outstanding conjecture raised in the context of the black hole information paradox with respect to the depth at which a typical quantum circuit generates an entanglement assisted encoding against the erasure channel. In addition, we prove that typical quantum circuits of poly(log n) depth satisfy a stronger notion of scrambling and can be used to encode alpha n qubits into n qubits so that up to beta n errors can be corrected, for some constants alpha, beta > 0.

Guoding Liu, Zhenyu Du, Zi-Wen Liu +1 more

Efficient and high-performance quantum error correction is essential for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing. Low-depth random circuits offer a promising approach to identifying effective and practical encoding strategies. In this work, we rigorously prove through information-theoretic analysis that one-dimensional logarithmic-depth random Clifford encoding circuits can achieve high quantum error correction performance. We demonstrate that these random codes typically exhibit good approximate quantum error correction capability by proving that their encoding rate achieves the hashing bound for Pauli noise and the channel capacity for erasure errors. We show that the error correction inaccuracy decays once a threshold of logarithmic depth is exceeded, resulting in negligible recovery errors. This threshold is shown to be lower than that of the simple separate block encoding, and the decay rate is higher. We further establish that these codes are optimal by proving that logarithmic depth is necessary to maintain a constant encoding rate and high error correction performance. To prove our results, we propose decoupling theorems tailored for one-dimensional low-depth circuits. These results also imply strong decoupling and rapid thermalization properties in low-depth random circuits and have potential applications in quantum information science and physics.

Bill Fefferman

Anurag Anshu

We address the question of efficient implementation of quantum protocols, with small communication and entanglement, and short depth circuit for encoding or decoding. We introduce two new methods to achieve this, the first method involving two new versions of the convex-split lemma that use much smaller amount of additional resource (in comparison to previous version) and the second method being inspired by the technique of classical correlated sampling in computer science literature. These lead to a series of new consequences, as follows. First, we consider the task of quantum decoupling, where the aim is to apply an operation on a n-qubit register so as to make it independent of an inaccessible quantum system. Many previous works achieve decoupling with the aid of a random unitary. It is known that random unitaries can be replaced by random circuits of size O(nlog n) and depth poly(log n), or unitary 2-designs based on Clifford circuits of similar size and depth. We show that given any choice of basis such as the computational basis, decoupling can be achieved by a unitary that takes basis vectors to basis vectors. Thus, the circuit acts in a `classical' manner and additionally uses O(n) catalytic qubits in maximally mixed quantum state. Our unitary performs addition and multiplication modulo a prime and hence achieves a circuit size of O(n\log n) and logarithmic depth. This shows that the circuit complexity of integer multiplication (modulo a prime) is lower bounded by the optimal circuit complexity of decoupling. Next, we construct a new one-shot entanglement-assisted protocol for quantum channel coding that achieves near-optimal communication through a given channel. Furthermore, the number of qubits of pre-shared entanglement is exponentially smaller than that used in the previous protocol that was near-optimal in communication. We also achieve similar results for the one-shot quantum state redistribution. Joint work with Rahul Jain. https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.07056

Ramis Movassagh