Quantum information scrambling is a unitary process that destroys local correlations and spreads information throughout the system, effectively hiding it in nonlocal degrees of freedom. In principle, unscrambling this information is possible with perfect knowledge of the unitary dynamics [B. Yoshida and A. Kitaev, arXiv:1710.03363.]. However, this Letter demonstrates that even without previous knowledge of the internal dynamics, information can be efficiently decoded from an unknown scrambler by monitoring the outgoing information of a local subsystem. We show that rapidly mixing but not fully chaotic scramblers can be decoded using Clifford decoders. The essential properties of a scrambling unitary can be efficiently recovered, even if the process is exponentially complex. Specifically, we establish that a unitary operator composed of t non-Clifford gates admits a Clifford decoder up to t≤n.
Scrambling of quantum information is an important feature at the root of randomization and benchmarking protocols, the onset of quantum chaos, and black-hole physics. Unscrambling this information is possible given perfect knowledge of the scrambler [arXiv:1710.03363]. We show that one can retrieve the scrambled information even without any previous knowledge of the scrambler, by a learning algorithm that allows the building of an efficient decoder. Remarkably, the decoder is classical in the sense that it can be efficiently represented on a classical computer as a Clifford operator. It is striking that a classical decoder can retrieve with fidelity one all the information scrambled by a random unitary that cannot be efficiently simulated on a classical computer, as long as there is no full-fledged quantum chaos. This result shows that one can learn the salient properties of quantum unitaries in a classical form and sheds a new light on the meaning of quantum chaos. Furthermore, we obtain results concerning the algebraic structure of
t-doped Clifford circuits, i.e., Clifford circuits containing
t non-Clifford gates, their gate complexity, and learnability that are of independent interest. In particular, we show that a
t-doped Clifford circuit
Ut can be decomposed into two Clifford circuits ${U}_{0},{U}_{0}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ that sandwich a local unitary operator
ut, i.e., ${U}_{t}={U}_{0}{u}_{t}{U}_{0}^{\ensuremath{'}}$. The local unitary operator
ut contains
t non-Clifford gates and acts nontrivially on at most
t qubits. As simple corollaries, the gate complexity of the
t-doped Clifford circuit
Ut is
O(n2+t3), and it admits a efficient process tomography using
poly(n,2t) resources.
Information scrambling refers to the unitary dynamics that quickly spreads and encodes localized quantum information over an entire many-body system and makes the information accessible from any small subsystem. While information scrambling is the key to understanding complex quantum many-body dynamics and is well-understood in random unitary models, it has been hardly explored in Hamiltonian systems. In this Letter, we investigate the information recovery in various time-independent Hamiltonian systems, including chaotic spin chains and Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev models. We show that information recovery is possible in certain, but not all, chaotic models, which highlights the difference between information recovery and quantum chaos based on the energy spectrum or the out-of-time-ordered correlators. We also show that information recovery probes transitions caused by the change of information-theoretic features of the dynamics. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Interactions in quantum systems can spread initially localized quantum information into the exponentially many degrees of freedom of the entire system. Understanding this process, known as quantum scrambling, is key to resolving several open questions in physics. Here, by measuring the time-dependent evolution and fluctuation of out-of-time-order correlators, we experimentally investigate the dynamics of quantum scrambling on a 53-qubit quantum processor. We engineer quantum circuits that distinguish operator spreading and operator entanglement and experimentally observe their respective signatures. We show that whereas operator spreading is captured by an efficient classical model, operator entanglement in idealized circuits requires exponentially scaled computational resources to simulate. These results open the path to studying complex and practically relevant physical observables with near-term quantum processors.
Quantum information scrambling has attracted much attention amid the effort to reconcile the conflict between quantum-mechanical unitarity and the thermalization irreversibility in many-body systems. Here we propose an unconventional mechanism to generate quantum information scrambling through a high-complexity mapping from logical to physical degrees-of-freedom that hides the logical information into nonseparable many-body correlations. Corresponding to this mapping, we develop an algorithm to efficiently sample a Slater-determinant wave function and compute all physical observables in dynamics with a polynomial cost in system size. The system shows information scrambling in the quantum many-body Hilbert space characterized by the spreading of Hamming distance. At late time we find emergence of classical diffusion dynamics in this quantum many-body system. We establish that the operator mapping enabled growth in an out-of-time-order correlator exhibits exponential-scrambling behavior. The quantum information-hiding mapping approach may shed light on the understanding of fundamental connections among computational complexity, information scrambling, and quantum thermalization.
How fast quantum information scrambles such that it becomes inaccessible by local probes turns out to be central to various fields. Motivated by recent works on spin systems with nonlocal interactions, we study information scrambling in different variants of the Ising model. Our work reveals that nonlocal interactions can induce operator dynamics not precisely captured by out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs). In particular, the operator size exhibits a slowdown in systems with generic power-law interactions despite a highly nonlinear light cone. A recently proposed microscopic model for fast scrambling does not show this slowdown, which uncovers a distinct analogy between a local operator under unitary evolution and the entanglement entropy following a quantum quench. Our work gives new insights on scrambling properties of systems in reach of current quantum simulation platforms and complements results on possibly observing features of quantum gravity in the laboratory.
Given an output wavefunction of a monitored quantum circuit consisting of both unitary gates and projective measurements, we ask whether two complementary subsystems are entangled or not. For Clifford circuits, we find that this question can be mapped to a certain classical error-correction problem where various entanglement measures can be explicitly computed from the recoverability. The dual classical code is constructed from spacetime patterns of out-of-time ordered correlation functions among local operators and measured Pauli operators in the past, suggesting that the volume-law entanglement in a monitored circuit emerges from quantum information scrambling, namely the growth of local operators. We also present a method of verifying quantum entanglement by providing a simple deterministic entanglement distillation algorithm, which can be interpreted as decoding of the dual classical code. Discussions on coding properties of a monitored Clifford circuit, including explicit constructions of logical and stabilizer operators, are also presented. Applications of our framework to various physical questions, including non-Clifford systems, are discussed as well. Namely, we argue that the entanglement structure of a monitored quantum circuit in the volume-law phase is largely independent of the initial states and past measurement outcomes except recent ones, due to the decoupling phenomena from scrambling dynamics, up to a certain polynomial length scale which can be identified as the code distance of the circuit. We also derive a general relation between the code distance and the sub-leading contribution to the volume-law entanglement entropy. Applications of these results to black hole physics are discussed as well.