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arXiv:2011.03145 · Physical Review A

Fuzzy measurements and coarse graining in quantum many-body systems

Carlos Pineda, David Davalos, Carlos Viviescas, Antonio Rosado

Published Oct 22, 2021• 8 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Using the quantum map formalism, we provide a framework to construct fuzzy and coarse-grained quantum maps of many-body systems that account for limitations in the resolution of real measurement devices probing them. The first set of maps handles particle-indexing errors, while the second deals with the effects of detectors that can only resolve a fraction of the system constituents. We apply these maps to a spin-$1/2 \mathit{XX}$ chain, obtaining a blurred picture of the entanglement generation and propagation in the system. By construction, both maps are simply related via a partial trace, which allows us to concentrate on the properties of the former. We fully characterize the fuzzy map, identifying its symmetries and invariant spaces. We show that the volume of the tomographically accessible states decreases at a double-exponential rate in the number of particles, imposing severe bounds on the ability to read and use information of a many-body quantum system.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.104.042218

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Using the quantum map formalism, we provide a framework to construct fuzzy and coarse-grained quantum maps of many-body systems that account for limitations in the resolution of real measurement devices probing them. The first set of maps handles particle-indexing errors, while the second deals with the effects of detectors that can only resolve a fraction of the system constituents. We apply these maps to a spin-1/2XX1/2 \mathit{XX}1/2XX chain, obtaining a blurred picture of the entanglement generation and propagation in the system. By construction, both maps are simply related via a partial trace, which allows us to concentrate on the properties of the former. We fully characterize the fuzzy map, identifying its symmetries and invariant spaces. We show that the volume of the tomographically accessible states decreases at a double-exponential rate in the number of particles, imposing severe bounds on the ability to read and use information of a many-body quantum system.
We study a coarse-graining map arising from incomplete and imperfect addressing of particles in a multipartite quantum system. In its simplest form, corresponding to a two-qubit state, the resulting channel produces a convex mixture of the two partial traces. We derive the probability density of obtaining a given coarse-grained state, using geometric arguments for two qubits coarse-grained to one, and random-matrix methods for larger systems. As the number of qubits increases, the probability density sharply concentrates around the maximally mixed state, making nearly pure coarse-grained states increasingly unlikely. For two qubits, we also compute the inverse state needed to characterize the effective dynamics under coarse-graining and find that the average preimage of the maximally mixed state contains a finite singlet component. Finally, we validate the analytical predictions by inferring the underlying probabilities from Monte-Carlo-generated coarse-grained statistics.
A bstract We present a new computational framework combining coarse-graining techniques with bootstrap methods to study quantum many-body systems. The method efficiently computes rigorous upper and lower bounds on both zero- and finite-temperature expectation values of any local observables of infinite quantum spin chains. This is achieved by using tensor networks to coarse-grain bootstrap constraints, including positivity, translation invariance, equations of motion, and energy-entropy balance inequalities. Coarse-graining allows access to constraints from significantly larger subsystems than previously possible, yielding tighter bounds compared to those obtained without coarse-graining.
Starting from a coarse-grained map of a quantum many-body system, we construct the inverse map that assigns a microscopic state to a coarse-grained state based on the maximum entropy principle. Assuming unitary evolution in the microscopic system, we examine the resulting dynamics in the coarse-grained system using the assignment map. We investigate both a two-qubit system, with \swap\ and controlled-\textsc{not}\ gates, and nnn-qubit systems, configured either in an Ising spin chain or with all-to-all interactions. We demonstrate that these dynamics exhibit atypical quantum behavior, such as nonlinearity and non-Markovianity. Furthermore, we find that these dynamics depend on the initial coarse-grained state and establish conditions for general microscopic dynamics under which linearity is preserved. As the effective dynamics induced by our coarse-grained description of many-body quantum systems diverge from conventional quantum behavior, we anticipate that this approach could aid in describing the quantum-to-classical transition and provide deeper insights into the effects of coarse graining on quantum systems.
We develop a systematic coarse-graining procedure for systems of NNN qubits. We exploit the underlying geometrical structures of the associated discrete phase space to produce a coarse-grained version with reduced effective size. Our coarse-grained spaces inherit key properties of the original ones. In particular, our procedure naturally yields a subset of the original measurement operators, which can be used to construct a coarse discrete Wigner function. These operators also constitute a systematic choice of incomplete measurements for the tomographer wishing to probe an intractably large system.
In the present article, we explore a suitable coarse-graining channel as a tool to describe effective entanglement spreading in a coarse-grained spin chain with different degrees of resolution. Comparing it with the experimental realizations performed with ultracold atoms, our results suggest that even if we are not able to fully resolve the system, entanglement can still be detected for some coarse-graining levels. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to have some information about the ``microscopic'' entanglement, even if we only have access to the system's coarse-grained description. We show that the amount of entanglement decays exponentially with the lack of system resolution. The lack of experimental resolution might thus lead to an effective classical description.
Real-world experiments on quantum systems are always performed with measurement apparatus whose interaction times with the systems are finite. This restricts the observable quantum states to the space of time-coarse-grained density matrices ${\overline{\ensuremath{\rho}}(t)}$, providing motivation for the time-coarse-graining (TCG) approach that solves for $\overline{\ensuremath{\rho}}(t)$ without ever referring to the unobservable $\ensuremath{\rho}(t)$ of infinite time resolution. Phenomenologically, this implies that coherent transitions far outside the bandwidth would be filtered out, leaving only their effective impacts on the ``slow'' dynamics resolvable by the finite time resolution of the measurements. Therefore, the TCG framework provides rigorous justification for many existing effective Hamiltonian methods in the literature that aim at capturing the unitary part of the long-time dynamics. However, since time-coarse-graining is fundamentally irreversible, the resulting effective model allows for secular loss of information and dissipation of energy in general, which cannot be captured by any unitary effective models and has to be treated with explicit time-coarse-graining. Such incoherent effects are particularly prominent in driven nonlinear quantum systems where exchange of information and energy with the drive gives rise to incoherent effective dynamics at all finite time resolutions in general. While rigorous in principle, existing TCG methods in the literature can be applied only to simple systems by one iteratively solving superoperator equations at low orders in the coupling strengths. The complexity of such methods prevents systematic study of the time-coarse-grained dynamics and limits analytical results to the IR (low-resolution) limit in most cases. We address these limitations in this paper, presenting a systematic time-coarse-graining method that overcomes the complexities and restrictions of current techniques, offering a comprehensive and accurate modeling framework for driven nonlinear quantum systems. We derive closed-form formulas as well as diagrammatic representations for both unitary and nonunitary contributions, in the form of an effective Hamiltonian and nonunitary dissipators at arbitrary order in the coupling strengths, and complement this with a computer-algebra software package. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method using several typical models of driven nonlinear systems in superconducting circuits, and show that it generalizes and improves on existing methods by providing more accurate results and explaining phenomena that have not been accounted for.