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arXiv:2312.03838 · Quantum

Hayden-Preskill recovery in chaotic and integrable unitary circuit dynamics

Michael A. Rampp, Pieter W. Claeys

Published Aug 8, 2024• 7 citations
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Abstract

The Hayden-Preskill protocol probes the capability of information recovery from local subsystems after unitary dynamics. As such it resolves the capability of quantum many-body systems to dynamically implement a quantum error-correcting code. The transition to coding behavior has been mostly discussed using effective approaches, such as entanglement membrane theory. Here, we present exact results on the use of Hayden-Preskill recovery as a dynamical probe of scrambling in local quantum many-body systems. We investigate certain classes of unitary circuit models, both structured Floquet (dual-unitary) and Haar-random circuits. We discuss different dynamical signatures corresponding to information transport or scrambling, respectively, that go beyond effective approaches. Surprisingly, certain chaotic circuits transport information with perfect fidelity. In integrable dual-unitary circuits, we relate the information transmission to the propagation and scattering of quasiparticles. Using numerical and analytical insights, we argue that the qualitative features of information recovery extend away from these solvable points. Our results suggest that information recovery protocols can serve to distinguish chaotic and integrable behavior, and that they are sensitive to characteristic dynamical features, such as long-lived quasiparticles or dual-unitarity.

DOI
10.22331/q-2024-08-08-1434

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The Hayden-Preskill protocol probes the capability of information recovery from local subsystems after unitary dynamics. As such it resolves the capability of quantum many-body systems to dynamically implement a quantum error-correcting code. The transition to coding behavior has been mostly discussed using effective approaches, such as entanglement membrane theory. Here, we present exact results on the use of Hayden-Preskill recovery as a dynamical probe of scrambling in local quantum many-body systems. We investigate certain classes of unitary circuit models, both structured Floquet (dual-unitary) and Haar-random circuits. We discuss different dynamical signatures corresponding to information transport or scrambling, respectively, that go beyond effective approaches. Surprisingly, certain chaotic circuits transport information with perfect fidelity. In integrable dual-unitary circuits, we relate the information transmission to the propagation and scattering of quasiparticles. Using numerical and analytical insights, we argue that the qualitative features of information recovery extend away from these solvable points. Our results suggest that information recovery protocols can serve to distinguish chaotic and integrable behavior, and that they are sensitive to characteristic dynamical features, such as long-lived quasiparticles or dual-unitarity.
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
In the original Hayden--Preskill recovery, the post-injection scrambler and initial state are {\it not related}. We extend this setup in two ways: by using a SWAP gate so that the scrambler and initial state are {\it related}, and by considering recovery at {\it finite} temperature. For this modified protocol, we show that the information is successfully recovered in the sense that the postselection probability is non-negligible and the conditional fidelity is large. We find that both the postselection probability and the conditional fidelity are proportional to temperature, reflecting the reduced entanglement of the initial state at lower temperatures. We also derive their late-time analytic estimates under the assumption of uniform operator spreading and show that they agree well with the numerical results. This demonstrates that strong scrambling is important for successful information recovery. Implementing the protocol on an IBM superconducting processor using a binary sparse SYK Hamiltonian with N=8N = 8N=8 Majoranas, we observe that the data retain the qualitative recovery dynamics and that a SWAP-based error-mitigation scheme improves both the postselection probability and the conditional fidelity.
Complex quantum many-body dynamics spread initially localized quantum information across the entire system. Information scrambling refers to such a process whose simulation is one of the promising applications of quantum computing. We demonstrate the Hayden-Preskill recovery protocol and the interferometric protocol for calculating out-of-time-ordered correlators to study the scrambling property of a one-dimensional kicked-Ising model on 20-qubit trapped-ion quantum processors. The simulated quantum circuits have a geometrically local structure that exhibits the ballistic growth of entanglement, resulting in the circuit depth being linear in the number of qubits for the entire state to be scrambled. We experimentally confirm the growth of signals in the Hayden-Preskill recovery protocol and the decay of out-of-time-ordered correlators at late times. As an application of the created scrambling circuits, we also experimentally demonstrate the calculation of the microcanonical expectation values of local operators adopting the idea of thermal pure quantum states. Our experiments are made possible by extensively utilizing one of the highest-fidelity quantum processors currently available and, thus, should be considered as a benchmark for the current status of the most advanced quantum computers.
Bipartite entanglement entropy is one of the most useful characterizations of universal properties in a many-body quantum system. Far from equilibrium, there exist two highly effective theories describing its dynamics -- the quasiparticle and membrane pictures. In this work we investigate entanglement dynamics, and these two complementary approaches, in a quantum circuit model perturbed by an impurity. In particular, we consider a dual unitary quantum circuit containing a spatially fixed, non-dual-unitary impurity gate, allowing for differing local Hilbert space dimensions to either side. We compute the entanglement entropy for both a semi-infinite and a finite subsystem within a finite distance of the impurity, comparing exact results to predictions of the effective theories. We find that for a semi-infinite subsystem, both theories agree with each other and the exact calculation. For a finite subsystem, however, both theories qualitatively differ, with the quasiparticle picture predicting a non-monotonic growth in contrast to the membrane picture. We show that such non-monotonic behavior can arise even in random chaotic circuits, shedding light on the range of validity of the membrane picture in such systems.
In certain analytically tractable quantum chaotic systems, the calculation of out-of-time-order correlation functions, entanglement entropies after a quench, and other related dynamical observables reduces to an effective theory of an "entanglement membrane" in spacetime.These tractable systems involve an average over random local unitaries defining the dynamical evolution.We show here how to make sense of this membrane in more realistic models, which do not involve an average over random unitaries.Our approach relies on introducing effective pairing degrees of freedom in spacetime, describing a pairing of forward and backward Feynman trajectories, inspired by the structure emerging in random unitary circuits.This viewpoint provides a framework for applying ideas of coarse graining to dynamical quantities in chaotic systems.We apply the approach to some translationally invariant Floquet spin chains studied in the literature.We show that a consistent line tension may be defined for the entanglement membrane and that there are qualitative differences in this tension between generic models and "dualunitary" circuits.These results allow scaling pictures for out-of-time-order correlators and for entanglement to be taken over from random circuits to nonrandom Floquet models.We also provide an efficient numerical algorithm for determining the entanglement line tension in 1 þ 1D.
We study properties of the Petz recovery map in chaotic systems, such as the Hayden-Preskill setup for evaporating black holes and the SYK model. Since these systems exhibit the phenomenon called scrambling, we expect that the expression of the recovery channel R\mathcal{R}R gets simplified, given by just the adjoint N†\mathcal{N}^{\dagger}N† of the original channel N\mathcal{N}N which defines the time evolution of the states in the code subspace embedded into the physical Hilbert space. We check this phenomenon in two examples. The first one is the Hayden-Preskill setup described by Haar random unitaries. We compute the relative entropy S(R[N[ρ]]∣∣ρ)S(\mathcal{R}\left[\mathcal{N}[ρ]\right] ||ρ)S(R[N[ρ]]∣∣ρ) and show that it vanishes when the decoupling is archived. We further show that the simplified recovery map is equivalent to the protocol proposed by Yoshida and Kitaev. The second example is the SYK model where the two dimensional code subspace is defined by an insertion of a fermionic operator, and the system is evolved by the SYK Hamiltonian. We check the recovery phenomenon by relating some matrix elements of an output density matrix ⟨T∣R[N[ρ]]∣T′⟩\langle T|\mathcal{R}[\mathcal{N}[ρ]]|T' \rangle⟨T∣R[N[ρ]]∣T′⟩ to Rényi-two modular flowed correlators, and show that they coincide with the elements for the input density matrix with small error after twice the scrambling time.