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arXiv:2205.12251 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

A multiplayer multiteam nonlocal game for the toric code

Vir B. Bulchandani, F. J. Burnell, S. L. Sondhi

Published Jan 12, 2023• 5 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Nonlocal games yield an unusual perspective on entangled quantum states. The defining property of such games is that a set of players in joint possession of an entangled state can win the game with higher probability than is allowed by classical physics. Here we construct a nonlocal game that can be won with certainty by $2N$ players if they have access to the ground state of the toric code on as many qubits. By contrast, the game cannot be won by classical players more than half the time in the large $N$ limit. Our game differs from previous examples because it arranges the players on a lattice and allows them to carry out quantum operations in teams, whose composition is dynamically specified. This is natural when seeking to characterize the degree of quantumness of nontrivial many-body states, which potentially include states in much more varied phases of matter than the toric code. We present generalizations of the toric code game to states with ${\mathbb{Z}}_{M}$ topological order.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.107.035409

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Nonlocal games yield an unusual perspective on entangled quantum states. The defining property of such games is that a set of players in joint possession of an entangled state can win the game with higher probability than is allowed by classical physics. Here we construct a nonlocal game that can be won with certainty by 2N2N2N players if they have access to the ground state of the toric code on as many qubits. By contrast, the game cannot be won by classical players more than half the time in the large NNN limit. Our game differs from previous examples because it arranges the players on a lattice and allows them to carry out quantum operations in teams, whose composition is dynamically specified. This is natural when seeking to characterize the degree of quantumness of nontrivial many-body states, which potentially include states in much more varied phases of matter than the toric code. We present generalizations of the toric code game to states with ZM{\mathbb{Z}}_{M}ZM​ topological order.
The parity game is an example of a nonlocal game: By sharing a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state before playing this game, the players can win with a higher probability than is allowed by classical physics. The GHZ state of NNN qubits is also the ground state of the ferromagnetic quantum Ising model on NNN qubits in the limit of vanishingly weak quantum fluctuations. Motivated by this observation, we examine the probability that NNN players who share the ground state of a generic quantum Ising model, which exhibits nonvanishing quantum fluctuations, still win the parity game using the protocol optimized for the GHZ state. Our main result is a modified parity game for which this protocol asymptotically exhibits quantum advantage in precisely the ferromagnetic phase of the quantum Ising model. We further prove that the ground state of the exactly soluble d=1+1d=1+1d=1+1 transverse-field Ising model can provide a quantum advantage for the parity game over an even wider region, which includes the entire ferromagnetic phase, the critical point and part of the paramagnetic phase. By contrast, we find examples of topological phases and symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases of matter, namely the deconfined phase of the toric code Hamiltonian and the ${\mathbb{Z}}_{2}\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}$ SPT phase in one dimension, that do not exhibit an analogous quantum advantage away from their fixed points.
Contextuality is arguably the fundamental property that makes quantum mechanics different from classical physics. It is responsible for quantum computational speedups in both magic-state-injection-based and measurement-based models of computation, and can be directly probed in a many-body setting by multiplayer nonlocal quantum games. Here, we discuss a family of games that can be won with certainty when performing single-site Pauli measurements on a state that is a codeword of a Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) error-correcting quantum code. We show that these games require deterministic computation of a code-dependent Boolean function, and that the classical probability of success is upper bounded by a generalized notion of nonlinearity/nonquadraticity. This success probability quantifies the state's contextuality, and is computed via the function's (generalized) Walsh-Hadamard spectrum. To calculate this, we introduce an efficient, many-body-physics-inspired method that involves identifying the symmetries of an auxiliary hypergraph state. We compute the classical probability of success for several paradigmatic CSS codes and relate it to both classical statistical mechanics models and to strange correlators of symmetry-protected topological states. We also consider CSS submeasurement games, which can only be won with certainty by sharing the appropriate codeword up to local isometries. These games therefore enable self-testing, which we illustrate explicitly for the 2D toric code. We also discuss how submeasurement games enable an extensive notion of contextuality in many-body states.
Many-body quantum games provide a natural perspective on phases of matter in quantum hardware, crisply relating the quantum correlations inherent in phases of matter to the securing of quantum advantage at a device-oriented task. In this Letter, we introduce a family of multiplayer quantum games for which topologically ordered phases of matter are a resource yielding quantum advantage. Unlike previous examples, quantum advantage persists away from the exactly solvable point and is robust to arbitrary local perturbations, irrespective of system size. We demonstrate this robustness experimentally on Quantinuum's H1-1 quantum computer by playing the game with a continuous family of randomly deformed toric code states that can be created with constant-depth circuits leveraging midcircuit measurements and unitary feedback. We are thus able to tune through a topological phase transition-witnessed by the loss of robust quantum advantage-on currently available quantum hardware. This behavior is contrasted with an analogous family of deformed Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, for which arbitrarily weak local perturbations destroy quantum advantage in the thermodynamic limit. Finally, we discuss a topological interpretation of the game, which leads to a natural generalization involving an arbitrary number of players.
Soon after the dawn of quantum error correction, DiVincenzo and Peres observed that stabilizer codewords could give rise to simple proofs of quantumness via contextuality. This discovery can be recast in the language of nonlocal games: every nnn-qubit stabilizer state defines a specific "stabilizer-testing" nnn-player nonlocal game, which quantum players can win with probability one. If quantum players can moreover outperform all possible classical players, then the state is contextual. However, the classical values of stabilizer-testing games are largely unknown for scalable examples beyond the nnn-qubit GHZ state. We introduce several new methods for upper-bounding the classical values of these games. We first prove a general coding-theory bound for all stabilizer-testing games: if the classical value pcl∗<1p_{\mathrm{cl}}^* < 1pcl∗​<1, then pcl∗≤7/8p_{\mathrm{cl}}^* \leq 7/8pcl∗​≤7/8, i.e., there is no classical strategy that can perform as well as the optimal quantum strategy even in an asymptotic sense. We then show how to tighten this bound for the most common scalable examples, namely GHZ, toric-code and cyclic cluster states. In particular, we establish an asymptotically tight upper bound for cyclic cluster states using transfer-matrix methods. This leads to the striking conclusion that measuring an exponentially small fidelity to the cyclic cluster state will suffice to witness its contextuality.
Nonlocal quantum games provide proof of principle that quantum resources can confer advantage at certain tasks. They also provide a compelling way to explore the computational utility of phases of matter on quantum hardware. In a recent manuscript [Hart et al., arXiv:2403.04829] we demonstrated that a toric code resource state conferred advantage at a certain nonlocal game, which remained robust to small deformations of the resource state. In this manuscript we demonstrate that this robust advantage is a generic property of resource states drawn from topological or fracton ordered phases of quantum matter. To this end, we illustrate how several other states from paradigmatic topological and fracton ordered phases can function as resources for suitably defined nonlocal games, notably the three-dimensional toric-code phase, the X-cube fracton phase, and the double-semion phase. The key in every case is to design a nonlocal game that harnesses the characteristic braiding processes of a quantum phase as a source of contextuality. We unify the strategies that take advantage of mutual statistics by relating the operators to be measured to order and disorder parameters of an underlying generalized symmetry-breaking phase transition. Finally, we massively generalize the family of games that admit perfect strategies when codewords of homological quantum error-correcting codes are used as resources.