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arXiv:2002.00247

High probability decoupling via approximate unitary designs and efficient relative thermalisation

Aditya Nema, Sen, Pranab

Published Feb 1, 2020• 3 citations
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Abstract

We prove a new concentration result for non-catalytic decoupling by showing that, for suitably large $t$, applying a unitary chosen uniformly at random from an approximate $t$-design on a quantum system followed by a fixed quantum operation almost decouples, with high probability, the given system from another reference system to which it may initially have been correlated. Earlier works either did not obtain high decoupling probability, or used provably inefficient unitaries, or required catalytic entanglement for decoupling. In contrast, our approximate unitary designs always guarantee decoupling with exponentially high probability and, under certain conditions, lead to computationally efficient unitaries. As a result we conclude that, under suitable conditions, efficiently implementable approximate unitary designs achieve relative thermalisation in quantum thermodynamics with exponentially high probability. We also show the scrambling property of black hole, when the black hole evolution is according to pseudorandom approximate unitary $t$-design, as opposed to the Haar random evolution considered earlier by Hayden-Preskill.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2002.00247

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We prove a new concentration result for non-catalytic decoupling by showing that, for suitably large ttt, applying a unitary chosen uniformly at random from an approximate ttt-design on a quantum system followed by a fixed quantum operation almost decouples, with high probability, the given system from another reference system to which it may initially have been correlated. Earlier works either did not obtain high decoupling probability, or used provably inefficient unitaries, or required catalytic entanglement for decoupling. In contrast, our approximate unitary designs always guarantee decoupling with exponentially high probability and, under certain conditions, lead to computationally efficient unitaries. As a result we conclude that, under suitable conditions, efficiently implementable approximate unitary designs achieve relative thermalisation in quantum thermodynamics with exponentially high probability. We also show the scrambling property of black hole, when the black hole evolution is according to pseudorandom approximate unitary ttt-design, as opposed to the Haar random evolution considered earlier by Hayden-Preskill.
We prove a new concentration result for non-catalytic decoupling by showing that, for suitably largettt, applying a unitary chosen uniformly at random from an approximatettt-design on a quantum system followed by a fixed quantum operation almost decouples, with high probability, the given system from another reference system to which it may initially have been correlated. Earlier works either did not obtain high decoupling probability, or used provably inefficient unitaries, or required catalytic entanglement for decoupling. In contrast, our approximate unitary designs always guarantee decoupling with exponentially high probability and, under certain conditions, lead to computationally efficient unitaries. As a result we conclude that, under suitable conditions, efficiently implementable approximate unitary designs achieve relative thermalisation in quantum thermodynamics with exponentially high probability. We also show the scrambling property of black hole, when the black hole evolution is according to pseudorandom approximate unitaryttt-design, as opposed to the Haar random evolution considered earlier by Hayden-Preskill.
Consider a bipartite system, of which one subsystem, A , undergoes a physical evolution separated from the other subsystem, R . One may ask under which conditions this evolution destroys all initial correlations between the subsystems A and R , i.e. decouples the subsystems. A quantitative answer to this question is provided by decoupling theorems , which have been developed recently in the area of quantum information theory. This paper builds on preceding work, which shows that decoupling is achieved if the evolution on A consists of a typical unitary, chosen with respect to the Haar measure, followed by a process that adds sufficient decoherence. Here, we prove a generalized decoupling theorem for the case where the unitary is chosen from an approximate two-design. A main implication of this result is that decoupling is physical, in the sense that it occurs already for short sequences of random two-body interactions, which can be modeled as efficient circuits. Our decoupling result is independent of the dimension of the R system, which shows that approximate two-designs are appropriate for decoupling even if the dimension of this system is large.
We investigate decoupling, one of the most important primitives in quantum Shannon theory, by replacing the uniformly distributed random unitaries commonly used to achieve the protocol, with repeated applications of random unitaries diagonal in the Pauli- Z and - X bases. This strategy was recently shown to achieve an approximate unitary 2 -design after a number of repetitions of the process, which implies that the strategy gradually achieves decoupling. Here, we prove that even fewer repetitions of the process achieve decoupling at the same rate as that with the uniform ones, showing that rather imprecise approximations of unitary 2 -designs are sufficient for decoupling. We also briefly discuss efficient implementations of them and implications of our decoupling theorem to coherent state merging and relative thermalisation.
We investigate decoupling, one of the most important primitives in quantum Shannon theory, by replacing the uniformly distributed random unitaries commonly used to achieve the protocol, with repeated applications of random unitaries diagonal in the Pauli-Z and -X bases. This strategy was recently shown to achieve an approximate unitary 2-design after a number of repetitions of the process, which implies that the strategy gradually achieves decoupling. Here, we prove that even fewer repetitions of the process achieve decoupling at the same rate as that with the uniform ones, showing that rather imprecise approximations of unitary 2-designs are sufficient for decoupling. We also briefly discuss efficient implementations of them and implications of our decoupling theorem to coherent state merging and relative thermalisation.
Unitary designs provide finite-moment approximations to Haar-random unitaries, with wide-ranging applications across physics and quantum information, from scrambling and black-hole dynamics to foundational primitives in quantum algorithms. Strong unitary designs capture a more demanding operational notion of approximation, requiring indistinguishability from Haar randomness even for quantum algorithms that may access a unitary not only in the forward direction, but also through its inverse, transpose, and complex conjugate. Motivated by the physical requirement that scrambling arise within the system itself, Schuster, Ma, Lombardi, Brandão, and Huang (arXiv:2509.26310) left open whether strong unitary designs can be generated in logarithmic depth using only the system qubits. For every fixed design order kkk and measurable-error tolerance, we construct strong approximate unitary kkk-designs in optimal Θ(log⁡n)Θ(\log n)Θ(logn) all-to-all circuit depth using only the nnn original system qubits. Our new ingredient is a logarithmic-depth Pauli-mixing bound for the perfect-matching ensemble, whose layers pair the qubits uniformly at random and apply independent random two-qubit gates. This bound controls the mixed forward-reverse two-query case, which we combine with existing design and gluing results to obtain strong unitary designs of arbitrary fixed order.
In a breakthrough, Hastings showed that there exist quantum channels whose classical Holevo capacity is superadditive i.e. more classical information can be transmitted by quantum encoding strategies entangled across multiple channel uses as compared to unentangled quantum encoding strategies. Hastings’ proof used Haar random unitaries to exhibit superadditivity. In this paper we show that a unitary chosen uniformly at random from an approximaten2/3n^{2/3}n2/3-design gives rise to a quantum channel with superadditive classical Holevo capacity, wherennnis the dimension of the unitary exhibiting the Stinespring dilation of the channel superoperator. We follow the geometric functional analytic approach of Aubrun, Szarek and Werner in order to prove our result. More precisely we prove a sharp Dvoretzky-like theorem stating that, with high probability under the choice of a unitary from an approximatettt-design, random subspaces of large dimension make a Lipschitz function take almost constant value. Such theorems were known earlier only for Haar random unitaries. We obtain our result by appealing to Low’s technique for proving concentration of measure for an approximatettt-design, combined with a stratified analysis of the variational behaviour of Lipschitz functions on the unit sphere in high dimension. The stratified analysis is the main technical advance of this work. Haar random unitaries require at leastΩ(n2)\Omega (n^{2})Ω(n2)random bits in order to describe them with good precision. In contrast, there exist exactn2/3n^{2/3}n2/3-designs using onlyO(n2/3log⁡n)O(n^{2/3} \log n)O(n2/3logn)random bits. Thus, our work can be viewed as a partial derandomisation of Hastings’ result, and a step towards the quest of finding an explicit quantum channel with superadditive classical Holevo capacity. Finally we also show that for anyp>1p > 1p>1, approximate unitaryn1.7n^{1.7}n1.7-designs give rise to channels violating subadditivity of Rényippp-entropy. In addition to stratified analysis, the proof of this result uses a new technique of approximating a monotonic differentiable function defined on a closed bounded interval and its derivative by moderate degree polynomials which should be of independent interest.